Now comes Tom Zoellner’s The National Road, an offering that fits neatly into the welter of recent, very good books about America, and yet lives agreeably apart, too. In James and Deborah Fallows’s Our Towns, Jill Lepore’s remarkable one-volume history, These Truths, and hundreds of other titles, authors have waxed poetic, raged, mourned and marveled - as if at a runaway train, on fire, filled with murder hornets - at Uncle Sam in the MAGA age. In recent years, though, that steady stream of books about America became a torrent. And no wonder: few protagonists can compete with what journalist John Gunther, in his classic 1947 travelogue, Inside U.S.A., called, “the greatest, craziest, most dangerous, least stable, most spectacular, least grown-up and most powerful and magnificent nation ever known.” Ever since the United States barged on to the world stage, like a prodigiously gifted but awkward infant, writers have been producing smart, searching, occasionally revelatory books about the promise and the horrors of the American experiment.
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