Negative On Everything. Straight up, this is the most depressing book I’ve ever read other than The Road by Cormac McCarthy – which is the singular *worst* book I’ve ever read. Kendzior’s all-encompassing and ever present sense of doom drips from every page, and it is truly exhausting to even read a book that is this utterly bleak. I truly can’t imagine living life so utterly despairing – even in my own darkest of times. And this was the reason for one of the star deductions. This tale could have been phenomenal, even transcendental, as a more hopeful look at traveling the US to see its various national parks – and it could have been such even with a pessimistic world view and even with the author’s rampant cognitively dissonant political views intact. Simply write with a more hopeful tone than what is presented here!
The other star deduction is the dearth of the bibliography, clocking in at just 7% of the overall text, well short of even the 15% or so I would expect to see in even my more relaxed bibliographical standards of these last couple of years.
For those that see the United States as something to “survive, not thrive” as Kendzior so often notes – even during the Obama and Biden years! – and those that see “women treated as second class citizens, no longer having the same rights as men” (a paraphrase, but not too far off from an exact quote)… you’re probably going to think Kendzior a savant here, describing exactly how you feel to a T.
For the rest of us that choose to look on every situation, no matter how bleak, with hope – indeed, particularly for those of us who will *NEVER* see our own political preferences win in any ballot box, given the current state of affairs, yet we fight on for a better future for everyone anyway – this book is going to be one you’re going to want to defenestrate early and often.
To be quite honest, had I not accepted this as an Advance Review Copy given the strength of Kendzior’s prior work A View From Flyover Country, I would have been right there with you. Had I known how utterly depressing this book would be – obvious in even the first few paragraphs, much less the first chapters – I would have returned it in a heartbeat and never looked back.
As an exemplar of how at least some Americans are feeling and have felt for several years, yes, this book will stand as a time capsule of an era.
But it is also *a* time capsule, and one that will earn its place in the annals of history – if it is remembered that long – for how wrong it is. For how utterly depressing it is, even in a time when America and Americans are more prosperous than literally any generation before them. Things that were science fiction even in my own childhood, just a few scant years behind Kendzior’s own, are now science fact. Devices and technologies that Kendzior describes *in this text* as using at various points were barely imaginable in my own childhood, certainly to the level that they both now exist and permeate modern life.
Yes, we absolutely face challenges today, as *all* eras have faced. Denying this is denying reality at least as bad as Kendzior does. But for a book so replete with so much historical data about so many different places, Kendzior seems to miss that many of the very eras she discusses had *just* as many problems. Hell, not only this, Kendzior openly discusses the history of “Blood Island”, where politicians and others would go to duel… and yet still decries a heated political rally as a “coup”, even when no weapons were present other than in the hands of police.
No, this is a book that will play well with a very particular mindset and a very particular political view… and in all honesty, the only use anyone outside of that mindset and worldview would have to read this text is simply to see this mindset and at least attempt to understand it. Hell, maybe you’ll have more success on that point than I have after reading this.
Recommended. Only for certain readers.
This review of The Last American Road Trip by Sarah Kendzior was originally written on March 27, 2025.
