![]() The author’s diverse, penetrating essays, some previously published, can only answer that question in part, but his effort is valiant, deeply moral, and often moving, based on observations gleaned from 30 years of crisscrossing the country, frequently by car. The principal inspiration for this collection was journalist John Gunther’s Inside U.S.A. (1947), which Zoellner calls “a staggering achievement and the best tome about this nation ever written.” Taking on a similar task, Zoellner wonders how an increasingly fractured nation of such disparate lands and peoples remains united, however tenuously, in a consensus informed by the Constitution. In addition to his seven previous books, Zoellner, the politics editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, teaches at Chapman University and Dartmouth College. Longing for a kind of national cultural citizenship, the author knows that absorbing even the barest fraction of a country’s everyday majesty, and tribulation, is the work of a lifetime. ![]() ![]() America is a vast and daunting prospect, and Zoellner thirsts for more. ![]()
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