25 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Rife with Errors, But Not without Value, August 14, 2008
This review is from: Are We There Yet?: The Golden Age of American Family Vacations (Culture America) (Hardcover)
Although I found Rugh's summaries of complaint letters received by the NAACP and National Park Service to be captivating, her book is riddled with minor errors, inconsistencies in argument, claims beyond the scope of her compiled evidence (mostly secondary sources), and outright incorrect citing of sources. These errors overshadow the amount of decent research performed.
The book is not well-edited. Rugh confuses the plural with the singular as "camping materials" becomes "it" (p. 144) or "park operators" becomes "he" (p. 148). She becomes lost in her summaries as sources seem to overlap and stories and pronouns become confused (see pp. 157-158 in her discussion of the Gilmans' resort and mixing it up with Ryan's narrative). She states that Sinking Spring Farm is in Rockport, Indiana, when it is actually located near Hodgenville, Kentucky (p. 54). The New England Thruway becomes "The New England thruway" (p. 75). She refers to "The phenomenon of 30,000 motels" (p. 36) when just mentioning that the number of motels peaked at 51,000 (p. 35). These types of errors pepper her book.
Her arguments are not consistent through the book. At the beginning, she is careful to state that the family ideal in the 1950s did not really exist according to historians (p. 6), but then says she focused on families that fit the ideal (p. 11) and then makes assumptions about postwar reality based upon advertising, and other popular culture (see pp. 125-126 for an example regarding camping). She draws all sorts of generalizations about reality from advertising and popular culture when such research should have been presented as how businesses viewed the needs of the public (i.e. not a portrayal of what exactly was occurring in families).
At one point, she refers to how the United States became a multicultural mosaic in the 1970s, rather than a country defined by cartographers as a collection of regions (p. 54). However, later in the book, Rugh relies on defining various regions of the United States, sometimes poorly (see pp. 156-157 for an example: "Visitors were usually from the Midwest, but less than a third came from Minnesota, with 20 percent from Illinois, 18 percent from Iowa and about 5 percent each from Indiana, Missouri and Nebraska." Compare p. 74 where Indiana is in the Midwest. How does she define these regions?). The layers of inconsistency are confusing to the reader.
Her terms are ill-defined, such as "class" and even "vacation." Her "middle class" (the class she decided to focus on) included herself, the daughter of a Harvard-educated father, a Radcliffe alum, and a woman whose family could afford a two-week excursion including airfare and rented car. At different times in the book she both accepts and dismisses weekend trips as part of her focus (i.e. writes of people traveling from New York City to the Catskills by expressway, but then laments how weekend trips are supposedly becoming more common nowadays). This lack of definition hampers her discussion, especially when she's trying to answer questions as broad as: "How did this madness get started?" (p. 2).
Throughout the book, her claims are inadequately supported by the cites provided. She makes the claim that more middle-class Americans could afford to go to Europe at some point after her "Golden Age" (whenever that was--the exact end of the study period is unclear) and cites a 1954 Gallup poll, a 1962 outdoor recreation survey, and the entire book, "The Conquest of Cool" by Thomas Frank (p. 6). The statement that "...as a result of intense competition from the Arab oil embargo, by 1980 gas stations found they no longer needed maps to attract motorists" is "supported" by a book on road map art and a publication by Rand McNally on free road maps dated "ca. 1972-1973" (p. 45). She uses a single, three-page article from the Ladies' Home Journal to argue that vacations came to be viewed as a threat to the family (pp. 178-179). Even the number of interviews and other transcripts used to characterize the postwar road trip was woefully small for her subsequent conclusions (especially when considering that millions of surviving baby boomers provide an accessible pool of valuable memories). The list of broad claims being flimsily supported by their associated cites is quite long.
And then there are cites that are completely wrong altogether. In another mention of the Arab oil embargo's negative effect, she uses a 1946 Gallup Poll (p. 12, Note 25). The claim that "The rapid resumption of pleasure travel surprised everyone in its scale" is supported by President Truman's travel logs (p. 3, Note 5). "A postwar map and guide" was actually published during the war circa 1942 (p. 59, Note 39). Perhaps the most frustrating is a cite that refers to pages of the 1962 outdoor recreation survey that cover sporting events, rather than a host of statistics regarding national park visitation and camper registration (p. 120, Note 6).
Basing her claims in more primary sources would have helped this book tremendously. This is why her research of the letters sent to the NAACP and NPS were the best parts of the book (her review of oral histories regarding Minnesota resorts a close second). She ignored data that would have helped strengthen or amend her claims regarding this era of travel (most notably U.S. Department of Transportation's Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey) and instead opted for easier, weaker ways out (newspaper articles, advertising, popular culture, etc.). In short, the book was very disappointing due to all of the errors and concerns I have mentioned here.
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7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
more like a business trip than a vacation, November 19, 2008
This review is from: Are We There Yet?: The Golden Age of American Family Vacations (Culture America) (Hardcover)
With its snappy title, I expected a lively, conversational work in the spirit of Erma Bombeck or Dave Barry, perhaps with a few celebrity reminiscences or interviews with retired tourist attraction operators mixed in with a broad discussion of the vacation trends that waxed and waned during the period in question (1947-1973). What we have instead is a college history professor who has taken her unedited research notes and thrown them on the page. There is not even the most rudimentary attempt to shape a narrative - reading this is literally like reading 184 pages of footnotes, with all the tedium that implies.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Misleading ? Title & Cover, August 24, 2010
This review is from: Are We There Yet?: The Golden Age of American Family Vacations (Culture America) (Hardcover)
From the cover & title, I expected this book to be more Bill Bryson-esqe, full of interesting anecdotes. Instead, it was a heavily foot-noted & researched (cannot speak for the accuracy of the research) and humorless - more like a disertation. It was still interesting, just not "light" reading like the title would imply (with the exception of the last chapter).
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