He has his own premonitions of end times. He understands how history has been altered by Americans’ quirky religious yearnings and eschatological obsessions. Tom Zoellner is the New York Times bestselling author of nine nonfiction books, including Uranium Train and The Heartless Stone.
Zoellner is a superb reporter and a deep thinker, with a command of the centuries-long back story. But these distracting moments of writerly writing are few. He’s also a busy one, prone to occasional flights of poetastery. The National Road is by no means an issue book, but it says more about predatory late-capitalism than many works that attack the topic head-on. Louis suburb plagued by racism, redlining and corruption the Nevada desert, where generations of fortune hunters have sought treasure above and below ground, in casinos and in gold mines, which, when they are stripped bare, leave behind ghost towns marked by toxic piles of tailings. Zoellner surveys other manifestations of malaise: the decline of the traditional porn movie industry in 'the other Hollywood,' L.A.’s San Fernando Valley a St. The National Road is a chronicle of Zoellner’s wanderings and wanderlust, what he calls his 'unspecified hunger' to cover the lower 48 states with 'a coat of invisible paint.' It’s also a sneakily ambitious book whose 13 'dispatches' present a sweeping view of the American land and its inhabitants - how each has shaped, and deformed, the other.
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