There’s nothing like a cross-country road trip to help you reach your reading goals. My recent jaunt through large portions of the American West gave me ample time to both observe our country’s natural beauties and to read more deeply about the people who inhabit her — even if my reading was mostly centered on the East Coast and Europe. My historian of choice? David McCullough — whose biography of the Wright Brothers is one of the most marvelous and inspiring books I’ve ever read. Another of his histories, The Greater Journey, sat on my shelf — after I’d found it at a secondhand store — for at least four years. I saw it daily and was truly determined to read it, but despite my approbation for his Wright Brothers book, The Greater Journey, at 400-odd pages, intimidated me. When, however, you’re confined to the back right seat of a Nissan Murano for nearly 50 hours, you can accomplish an impressive amount of reading.
Though it may initially strike some readers as unpatriotic, The Greater Journey, which details the scores of Americans who moved to Paris between 1830 and 1900, is a remarkable and deeply pro-America book. In fact, McCullough repeatedly stresses how much the individuals he was writing about loved their country and were proud of their roots. So why go to Paris at all? What could these determined men and women not find in the land of opportunity that they needed to make such a dangerous and grueling passage?
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