ROADSIDE AMERICANS, by Jack Reid, chronicles the rise and fall of hitchhiking in the Unites States from the Great Depression through the 1980's. A well researched and detailed history, Reid looks at hitchhiking from the rider/driver perspective, to a community perception, from city planning considerations, to national and international ruminations and opinions of hitchhiking across the aforementioned era.
Reid begins describing the origins of hitchhiking: limited automobiles, surviving by working anywhere and limited public transportation. It evolved during World War II, waned during the economically thriving 1950's, then resurged through the 1960's and 1970's from a general uprising of helping out the fellow man coupled with a desire for adventure and connecting with the unknown (people and places). Reid constantly reminds us that until the 1980's, whatever feelings of the inherent danger that comes with hitchhiking rarely outweighed the desire for those who chose to hitchhike. The feeling while reading this book is that no stone in the study of hitchhiking has been left unturned, but there is an large amount of rephrasing the same point and redundancy throughout the book. Some really fascinating facts are frequent and interesting, but the reader could grow weary of the repetition of the same point.
Being born in the 1970's, I missed the age of hitchhiking and only every understood it as an extremely dangerous and kind of pointless venture since most everyone has a car or someone in their family does. ROADSIDE AMERICANS illuminated a lifestyle I was never really versed on until now. Hitchhiking being part of the fabric of our country for a good part of the 20th Century I didn't not fully comprehend until after reading this book.
Thank you to University of North Carolina Press, Jack Reid, and Netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review! ( )