The National Road

The National Road is a collection of essays about American places, each dealing with contentious matters: religion, politics, sex, race, poverty, loss and the stubborn persistence of national pride, despite abundant reasons for cynicism. An important question lies at the heart of this collection: what does it mean to belong" in America in the midst of an era when rootedness to a particular piece of ground means less than at any time during our history? These essays cover a wide range of subjects: the changing geography of pornography, the proliferation of "dollar stores," the unique pain of losing a house, the joy and futility of cross-country drives, the ways that certain town governments can turn vicious, the quest to stand upon the topographical roof of every state, a journey into the wilderness to find the body of a notorious killer, a unique examination of the most "American" major religion in the gloom past midnight, a personal eulogy for the metropolitan daily newspaper. From their particular angles, they all examine changing definitions of this shared soil. In a time of collective unease, the American land - this magnificent 3.7 million square miles -- is the lowest denominator of what we have in common"--