An April Across America

Written in the accessible style of a long letter home, this book combines the narratives of travel, memoir, sports, and history, which blend together in Stevenson’s wry sense of observation.<p>In April 2005, Matthew Stevenson—author of the acclaimed <I>Letters of Transit</I>and <I>Mentioned in Dispatches</I>, both collections of travel essays—flew from his adopted home in Switzerland to his native United States, and set out on a cross-country journey. <I>(“Thus I blocked out several weeks in April, booked a plane to New York, and made my plans to head west. All Huck Finn had to do was ease his craft into the river, but as he observed ‘the raft did seem to go mighty slow.’”)</I> <p>Traveling south from Princeton, New Jersey (<I>“the exception to my conclusion that George Washington was a mediocre general who survived mostly with good luck”)</I>, he visits Baltimore and the Babe Ruth Museum, Washington, D.C. <I>(“inaccessible behind an imperial façade”)</I>, and the Civil War battlefields of northern Virginia before heading south through the southern states of North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi.