The Last American Road Trip: A Memoir

By Sarah Kendzior (2025).

Kendzior’s essays document her family’s road trips from 2016 to 2024, spidering out from her home in St. Louis, Missouri. Her stops included as many National Parks and limestone caves and Mark Twain memorials as she could reach, quirky monuments along Route 66 like Cadillac Ranch, and the Will Rogers Archway Interstate rest stop in Oklahoma (the largest in the country). Each trip is a springboard for Kendzior to reflect on her views of the state of the country, which are often catastrophic, if not apocalyptic. But I forgave her excesses when, reflecting on a series of COVID tests she took on one trip, she demonstrated her self-awareness: “I never did test positive, but you know me, I’m negative on everything.” And her negativity serves a purpose. In her final essay, Kendzior reflects on America’s resilience but warns “in a world of existential threats, a life that is more than mere survival hinges not on hope but on imagination.” Kendzior’s view of America is full of imagination, and if she sometimes imagines things are worse than you think, she still helps us to question our assumptions, to look beyond received wisdom, to learn the kind of hard-won lessons that are necessary for real transformation, and to feed the kind of anger that motivates us to use our own imagination and look beyond mere survival.

I listened to a digital download of this book.