num_pages: 226
description: One of the New Yorker 's Best Books of 2022Bill McKibbenaward-winning author activist educatoris fiercely curious.Im curious about what went so suddenly sour with American patriotism American faith and American prosperity.Like so many of us McKibben grew up believingknowingthat 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.
language: English
title: The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened
publisher: Henry Holt and Co.