The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon

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 curious: 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 ra