"Narrator Eric Jason Martin adds gusto to this mini-memoir, which spans much of author Bill McKibben's lifetime."-AudioFile on The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon
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 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.
A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Co.
- 2025 Libby Book Award Winners and Runners Up
- How Does Your Garden Grow?
- National Poetry Month
- 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution
- GRPL Staff Picks
- Celebrating Women
- Curl Up with a Cozy Read
- Our Favorite Sleuths
- Life-Changing Women
- Women's History Month
- Stacks on Stacks on Stacks
- Celebrating Black Lit
- Workplace Romances
- See all ebooks collections
- 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution
- 2025 Libby Book Award Winners and Runners Up
- National Poetry Month
- How Does Your Garden Grow?
- She Persisted: Women's history
- Women's History Month
- Our Favorite Sleuths
- Curl Up with a Cozy Read
- Workplace Romances
- GRPL Staff Picks
- Stacks on Stacks on Stacks
- Celebrate Black History
- Audiobooks for your Commute
- See all audiobooks collections