Such grandiose self-importance, thankfully, is not his style. Having grown up in the very town where the American revolution began, McKibben seems to be following a script that called for a young man like him to carry on the lessons of the revolution. Lexington, the Boston suburb where McKibben was raised, fits the purposes of this book with straight-from-central-casting perfection. Among his many heresies, perhaps foremost among them, is that he long ago opted to forego the straight and narrow of single-minded literary ambition, despite that fast track start, and chose instead to go all-in as an activist on the environmental issues he writes about so eloquently.)
The book’s opening section, “The Flag,” begins with an account that originally appeared online in the New Yorker as “The Second (and Third) Battle of Lexington.” (McKibben’s first job fresh out of college was as a New Yorker staff writer.
Underlying this is his fervent wish, as writer and activist, to add a new next chapter to the American story, one that could yet make it turn out all right. Subtitled “ A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened,” McKibben attempts with this, his 19th book, an audacious mashup of memoir, history, theology, socioeconomics, climate science (of course), and a stab at a unified theory of the country’s descent into a demoralized state. It would be a mistake to review Bill McKibben’s latest work, The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon, as if it were but another entry in the high-stakes publishing sweepstakes to capture the zeitgeist and bring home the gold. Henry Holt and Co., 240 pages, $27.99 (hardback). The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon by Bill McKibben. What a cruel hoax: the middle-class suburban lifestyle, a proud achievement of postwar America and the envy of peoples throughout the world (in no small part due to Mad Men glamorization), contains the very seeds of our demise.
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