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For his 2004 book Rats, Vogue editor Robert Sullivan physically probed the rodents' domain to observe their behavior and chronicle effects the vermin have on humans far beyond New York's dumpsters. In his narrative travel journal Cross Country, Sullivan trades his dark alley in favor of a wide-open foray into the history of America's highways and byways. Family in tow, he journals his way across the U.S. With 15 years of cross-country driving to reflect upon, Sullivan contemplates travel minutiae that modern road warriors may never take time to notice: coffee cup lids, travel guides, Holiday Inn Expresses and concrete highway barriers. Early in the trip he notes that his family just barely tolerates his "rattling on" about what he assumes to be "the significance of things."

For seven days, Sullivan and his family motor from a summer vacation in Oregon to their home in New York via the Great Plains, the northern Midwest and the Northeast. Along the way, Sullivan ferrets out his own place in sea-to-sea movement and explores the story of American travel. He heads east, tracing pieces of Lewis and Clark's expeditionary trail, feeling like "a deranged driver on the wrong lane of the highway of American history." Meanwhile, Sullivan mulls over the monetary impetus for the country's early settlers to move westward in the first place and the ways Americans have kept this movement going (2006 marks the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower's Interstate System).

Sullivan puts a magnifying glass to the culture born from westward expansion, ruminating on the banal beauty of what is now mostly taken for granted outside our windshields. Like all good road books, Cross Country generates the excitement that the idea of transcontinental travel holds: the hope to find something new that we don't realize exists while standing still. At times, getting through all the "rattling on" makes the reader feel like Sullivan's teenage son, wanting to "just get there"; but, like any great American road trip, Cross Country wouldn't make it home without all the stops.