America the Beautiful?

One Woman in a Borrowed Prius on the Road Most Travelled

By: Blythe Roberson

Narrated by: Kendra Hoffman

Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins

Publisher's summary

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Best Book of the Year —NPR, Vulture, Book Riot, B&N

"America the Beautiful? is so funny and special and illuminating that it makes even me, a person who cannot tolerate trees or weather, wish I could've tagged along in the back seat."—Samantha Irby, author of Wow, No Thank You. and We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.

The author of How to Date Men When You Hate Men examines Americans’ obsession with freedom, travel, and the open road in this funny, entertaining travelogue that blends the humorous observations of Bill Bryson with the piercing cultural commentary of Jia Tolentino.

For writer and comedian Blythe Roberson, there are only so many Mary Oliver poems you can read about being free, and only so many times you can listen to Joni Mitchell’s travel album Hejira, before you too, are itching to take off. Canonical American travel writers have long celebrated the road trip as the epitome of freedom. But why does it seem like all those canonical travel narratives are written by White men who have no problems, who only decide to go the desert to see what having problems feels like?

To fill in the literary gaps and quench her own sense of adventure, Roberson quits her day job and sets off on a Great American Road Trip to visit America’s national parks.

America the Beautiful? is a hilarious trip into the mind of one of the Millennial generation’s funniest writers. Borrowing her Midwestern stepfather’s Prius, she heads west to the Loop of mega-popular parks, over to the ocean and down the Pacific Coast Highway, and, in a feat of spectacularly bad timing, through the southwestern desert in the middle of July. Along the way she meets new friends on their own personal quests, learns to cope with abstinence while missing the comforts of home, and comes to understand the limits—and possibilities—of going to nature to prove to yourself and your Instagram followers that you are, in fact, free.

The result is a laugh-out-loud-while-occasionally-raging-inside travelogue, filled with meditations and many, many jokes on ecotourism, conservation, freedom, traffic, climate change, and the structural and financial inequalities that limit so many Americans’ movement. Ultimately, Roberson ponders the question: Is quitting society and going on the road about enlightenment and liberty—or is it just selfish escapism?

©2022 Blythe Roberson (P)2022 HarperCollins Publishers

Wonderful

Great memoir/travelogue/story in the true road-trip tradition. Blythe’s voice is original and funny yet philosophical.

Laughter!

If you are looking to bring some positive energy and laughter into your life, then this is a listen for you.

Any vanlifer could give the same thesis of this book

Hysterical. And unfortunately plagued with an ill-researched, biased, one-note portrayal of vanlife. The author seems to think only her road trip has given her an epiphany about community over individualism and somehow those living full time on the road are too myopic and self-obsessed and capitalist to have the same realization and to be actively taking steps to build dispersed community and give back to their temporary communities. It’s a real shame considering that vanlifers, being an actual community of full-time American roadtrippers, will make up about a quarter of the readers buying this book.

A great book, especially if all you can afford is this book or a day trip

It is heart breaking that if I was ape era able to afford a trip such as this, it could be all gone. Go if you can but don’t steal the cactus :(

Fun Travel Listen

An enjoyable listen, captures the moment and internal conflicts around the national parks while being a joy to hear.

Great

Picked this book up in a whim! Loved it and it inspired me. Thank you

Loved story esp narrator

I hope the narrator does more books in the future! Really enjoyed her inflections etc

Returned

Unless you want a liberal lecture, I'd avoid this book. I listened to an hour and wanted to pull my ears off. I thought it was going to be about a roadtrip and self reflection. Maybe she gets to that later on. The first hour is just to let you know that she's a liberal. When I got to the part about the plastic straws, I decided I would just fast forward, but then we got to the Teddy Roosevelt park and I decided to return it. Not worth a listen unless you just hardcore agree with all of those stances and want to have them reinforced for you every other sentence.

Amusing in parts, but felt padded

When the author is writing about one of her destinations, the history, the nature, the people she meets along the way, it’s not bad. But she spends too much time looping around about why she felt compelled to go on a road trip and WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN and it gets thin. She didn’t have a lot of time and she seems to have spent much of it driving frantically from one place to another. Too much time in the car, not enough in the field, I think. That considered it’s impressive that she managed to squeeze a book out of it. Next time she should plop down in some remote desert spot and not touch her car keys for a month or so. I think that book would be more to my taste.

Disappointingly BORING

I loved her first book but this one can be summarized as: “I drove to a park. I had trouble finding parking. I saw a special tree!! I talked to a park ranger. We all should work together to end climate change. I drove to another park. I had trouble finding a parking spot…” No deep internal journey, no profound reflections, nothing notable. My god, it was dull.