The Flag, the Cross and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened

The dark heart of American racism, alienation, and environmental destruction lies in suburbia, according to this anguished jeremiad. McKibben (Falter) spotlights his 1960s boyhood hometown of Lexington, Mass., birthplace of the American Revolution and now an affluent Boston suburb, as the flip side of the American dream: full of high-minded liberalism, but careful to keep low-income, racially mixed housing out of its lily-white confines; a former bastion of Puritan religious communality now corroded by individualism and spiritual consumerism; and a redoubt of the fossil fuel–guzzling suburban economy that’s heating the climate. McKibben’s critique of suburbia is a familiar one, updated with contemporary twists. He presents a convincing case against suburban zoning codes that essentially ban affordable housing; less cogently, he calls for reparations to redistribute wealth accrued from racist housing policies of the past (while admitting that he’s “not sure” what form they should take) and claims that his fellow boomers are “about to be the first generation to leave the world a worse place than when we found it,” ignoring the steady, global rise in living standards of recent decades. Sharp autobiographical sketches and social commentary combined with too much ill-considered hand-wringing make this a mixed bag. (May)