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The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened
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About This Book
One of the New Yorker 's Best Books of 2022 Bill McKibben―award-winning author, activist, educator―is fiercely curious. "I'm curious about what went so suddenly sour with American patriotism, American faith, and American prosperity." Like so many of us, McKibben grew up believing―knowing―that the United States was the greatest country on earth. As a teenager, he cheerfully led American Revolution tours in Lexington, Massachusetts. He sang "Kumbaya" at church. And with the remarkable rise of suburbia, he assumed that all Americans would share in the wealth. But fifty years later, he finds himself in an increasingly doubtful nation strained by bleak racial and economic inequality, on a planet whose future is in peril. And he is What the hell happened? In this revelatory cri de coeur , McKibben digs deep into our history (and his own well-meaning but not all-seeing past) and into the latest scholarship on race and inequality in America, on the rise of the religious right, and on our environmental crisis to explain how we got to this point. He finds that he is not without hope. And he wonders if any of that trinity of his youth― The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon ―could, or should, be reclaimed in the fight for a fairer future.
Reviews
"Throughout the book, McKibben seems defensive in his national and personal teardown ..."
"He presents a convincing case against suburban zoning codes that essentially ban affordable housing; less cogently, he calls for reparations to redistribute wealth accrued from racist housing policies of the past...and claims that his fellow boomers are 'about to be the first generation to leave the world a worse place than when we found it,' ignoring the steady, global rise in living standards of recent decades."
"A reasonable if perhaps quixotic plea for the boomers to rise from the couch and get back to work fixing their messes."
"A clarifying discussion of why racism is systemic in American society and what remedies can be pursued ..."
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