Philip Caputo, who had just turned seventy, his wife, and their two English setters, took off in a truck hauling an Airstream camper from Key West, Florida, en route via back roads and state routes to Deadhorse, Alaska. The journey took four months and covered seventeen thousand miles, during which Caputo interviewed more than eighty Americans from all walks of life to get a picture of what their lives and the life of the nation are really about in the twenty-first century.