100 Books Like Our Towns

How perfect to go on a road trip with one of my favorite writers plus his gentlemanly, loveable dog!

I smile just thinking about this book. I was delighted every step of the way. I felt like I was in the passenger seat, handing biscuits to Charley, stopping to meet strangers, and ruminating on how the USA has changed over the decades.

I loved hearing his thoughts in his older, wiser years, after his great successes, but still passionate, or slyly ironic, on so many topics. I love that he’s matter-of-fact in discussing disillusionment, loneliness, racism, or anything – but he’s hopeful in the end, always.

I want to buy a stack of these and hand them out as gifts.

This is classic literature in the realm of American travel.

I had no idea that “blue highways” existed, and even though Heat-Moon went cross-country back in the 1970s in his van equipped with his igloo cooler and makeshift bed (not like the $100k fancy campers you find today), the type of people you meet and experiences you have in this amazing country are still relevant today.

In Blue Highways Revisited, I was shocked to read how long it took for this book to get published and the stacks of printed-out drafts he had of it (I think it was like four feet high). If there are any travel writing classes taught as part of a creative writing program, then Blue Highways better be on the list. 

With America's increasingly divisive political climate around LGBTQ issues, Real Queer America takes on renewed importance as Samantha Allen explores the resilient LGBTQ communities in red states.

Allen takes readers on a road trip through often-overlooked regions of the United States and challenges preconceived notions by showing LGBTQ communities thriving in places like Mississippi, Utah, and Indiana. I was inspired by Allen’s ability to curate personal storytelling alongside journalistic interviews with queer community leaders.

Allen strikes the perfect balance between travelogue and memoir – through her vulnerability in writing about her own coming out journey in America, she allows the reader to better understand what fueled the interest in red state queer communities and conveys the idea that the personal is always political.

Any recommendation about travel writing must surely include Bill Bryson. I love his writing, and I reckon this, his first book, is still the best.

I love the idea–brought up in small-town America he revisits the tours by car his family took as holidays. I love his descriptions and especially his ability to spot absurdities in a way that can have the me laughing aloud. It is a book that had me moving on to read everything he wrote thereafter.

I had never heard of Lorenzo de Zavala until I started researching El Norte, and his story deserves to be much more widely known. He was born in Mexico when it was still under Spanish rule, and later became involved in Mexican independence. He also participated in the formation of the breakaway Republic of Texas (Tejas) in 1836, and he served as its first vice-president. Before that period of his life, however, he took a tour of the United States. He started in New Orleans in 1830, working his way north and east. This book describes that trip and his observations about the United States. It is one of the earliest travel accounts of the US written by a Mexican, and it provides a fascinating perspective from someone whose life intersected with pivotal political moments in both countries.

The oral historian and radioman Studs Turkel takes us around American without leaving his Chicago via Division Street America. Sparsely contextualized by his interstitial commentary, Turkel exercises his embracing interviewing skills to bring poignant stories of the non-celebrity class into sharp, relevant focus. This same type of unornamented approach earned a Nobel Prize in literature for Belarussian journalist Svetlana Alexievich and her Chernobyl.

The most influential book on conspiracy theories, by any measure, published in 1966. Its title shouts Hofstadter’s thesis: A longstanding strain in American politics is marginal, dangerous, and a manifestation of political paranoia. Although countless op-ed writers have reduced his thesis to equate conspiracy theory to a paranoid mind, Hofstadter offers in the book’s first half more than simple social psychological analysis of the far right of the 1950s and 1960s, which included Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, and the John Birch Society.

One of the preeminent mid-twentieth century U.S. historians, Hofstadter wrote wonderfully, engaged in big ideas, and if his work ultimately needs updating and deserves critique, Paranoid Style set the terms for a debate that continues today about conspiracy theories’ role in our political order.

As the 1930s unfolded in Britain, news from Germany increasingly dominated the national conversation. Everyone was talking about Germany. And, as Julia Boyd’s absorbing book reveals, Britons from all walks of life were travelling there, too. I loved the sheer breadth of people featured, from holidaying teenagers and hard-bitten journalists to MPs, academics and curious adventurers.

Thomas Cook was offering holidays in Germany throughout the 1930s, despite proliferating accounts of injustice and downright persecution under Nazi rule. Some British visitors were clearly dazzled by National Socialism, others horrified. Most seemed aware that they were watching history unfold – and their accounts of everything from theatrical mass rallies to brutal street fights are all the more vivid as a result.

I love The Government-Citizen Disconnect because it examines the relationship between social policy and politics. 

Mettler demonstrates that over 90% of Americans receive financial benefits from the government, but most of these are submerged in the tax code (like the home mortgage interest deduction). People who only receive submerged benefits believe that the government does little to improve their personal lives. In contrast, the more antipathy they feel toward people who receive visible government benefits (like food stamps), the more they also express cynical, negative attitudes toward government in general.

Since White Americans are more likely to receive submerged benefits than Americans of color, this pattern fuels racialized “us vs. them” attitudes when, in fact, the government financially buffers most Americans from the full costs of the free market in a variety of ways.

Nothing is more American than making war in other countries, and Phil Klay’s collection of essays investigates that line between those Americans who fight in our current wars and those who get to stay home and eventually forget that there’s even a war taking place somewhere. Klay knows about what he writes. He’s a former marine who was stationed in Iraq, and while not seeing combat himself, he did see firsthand the complex relationship between occupied and occupier. Upon his return home, he was plunged into an even more surreal place: a country that had long since stopped paying attention. Bonus reading: Klay’s National Book Award-winning short story collection, Redeployment, where you can see how fiction becomes transmuted into nonfiction and vice versa.