The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon

A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened

By: Bill McKibben

Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin

"Narrator Eric Jason Martin adds gusto to this mini-memoir, which spans much of author Bill McKibben's lifetime."-AudioFile on The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon


Bill McKibben—award-winning author, activist, educator—is fiercely curious.

“I’m curious about what went so suddenly sour with American patriotism, American faith, and American prosperity.”

Like so many of us, McKibben grew up believing—knowing—that the United States was the greatest country on earth. As a teenager, he cheerfully led American Revolution tours in Lexington, Massachusetts. He sang “Kumbaya” at church. And with the remarkable rise of suburbia, he assumed that all Americans would share in the wealth.

But fifty years later, he finds himself in an increasingly doubtful nation strained by bleak racial and economic inequality, on a planet whose future is in peril.

And he is curious: What the hell happened?

In this revelatory cri de coeur, McKibben digs deep into our history (and his own well-meaning but not all-seeing past) and into the latest scholarship on race and inequality in America, on the rise of the religious right, and on our environmental crisis to explain how we got to this point. He finds that he is not without hope. And he wonders if any of that trinity of his youth—The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon—could, or should, be reclaimed in the fight for a fairer future.

A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Co.

A plea for community in an age of idealism.

As I prepared to retire after many decades of teaching, I remembered the many students that had shared the classroom with me and how almost all of them still believed in the “better angels of our nature” despite the rhetoric of hate and division that too many adults saw as good politics, I couldn’t help but feel that my generation had failed these young adults in some fundamental way,. However, while I recognized those failures, until I read this book, I didn’t realize that we had the opportunity to both help rekindle that idealism that once inspired us. Doing so would help pay our debt to future generations and reawaken the aspirations of our youth who chose to “dream of things that never were, and say why not.”

A constructive and educational look back on the reader’s life

And engagingly critical look at my times and what I might do about them in the ten or more years I hope to be given the grace to live.

Last chance for Baby Boomers!

McKibben has analyzed very ably, all the various strands running through recent US culture, strands, which have culminated in this moment of time, a time of crisis. He shows that many young people can no longer look optimistically into the future, as they are facing the disturbing reality of climate disaster, as well as racial and economic injustice around them. The author concludes that the generation which bears major responsibility for what has been happening politically up to this point, must now come to the rescue of the young, in order to effect last-minute, radical changes to save the future for their grandchildren: Baby Boomers, redeem yourselves, before it is too late!

A story for all to hear

This book was so well researched and well read. I enjoyed this book so much.Thank you Bill

Hard to take - but many should read

I struggled through this book as the author recounts personal life experiences and relates them to historical events and episodes that have brought us to our present state of stark divisions, and dysfunction. It’s a recount of the processes we go through, and I’m reminded how humanity has evolved very little socially since Ancient Greece. The actor reading the audio version I listened to had a “Rod Serling” tone of eminent doom- which I didn’t like.
But still, I recommend reading this book. Unfortunately, those who might benefit most from the enlightenment it offers likely won’t read it.