Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip

One of the Best Books of 2009 -Washington Post Utterly likable -Christopher Buckley [An] enchanting glimpse into a much simpler age -Library Journal. On June 19, 1953, Harry Truman got up early, packed the trunk of his Chrysler New Yorker, and did something no other ex-president has done before or since: he hit the road. No Secret Service protection. No traveling press. Just Harry and his high school sweetheart Bess, off to visit old friends, take in a Broadway play, celebrate their wedding anniversary in the Big Apple, and blow a bit of the money he'd just received to write his memoirs. Hopefully incognito. In this lively history, author Matthew Algeo meticulously details how Truman's plan to blend in went wonderfully awry. Fellow diners, bellhops, cabbies, squealing teenagers at a Future Homemakers of America convention, and one very by-the-book Pennsylvania state trooper all unknowingly conspired to blow his cover. Algeo revisits the Trumans' route, staying at the same hotels and eating at the same diners, and takes readers on brief detours into topics such as the postwar American auto industry, McCarthyism, the nation's highway system, and the decline of Main Street America. By the end of the 2,500-mile journey, you will have a new and heartfelt appreciation for America's last citizen-president. Matthew Algeo is the author of The President Is a Sick Man and Last Team Standing. An award-winning journalist, Algeo has reported from three continents for public radio's All Things Considered, Marketplace, and Morning Edition.