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American Ramble review: a riveting tale of the divided United States

Neil King Jr, once of the Wall Street Journal, walked from Washington to New York. His account of the journey is essential

I n spring 2021, Neil King trekked 330 miles from his Washington DC home to New York City. He passed through countryside, highways, towns and churchyards. His 25-day walk was also a journey through time. He looked at the US as it was and is and how it wishes to be seen. His resultant book is a beautifully written travelog, memoir, chronicle and history text. His prose is mellifluous, yet measured.

In his college days, King drove a New York cab. At the Wall Street Journal , his remit included politics, terror and foreign affairs. He did a stint as global economics editor. One might expect him to be jaded. Fortunately, he is not. American Ramble helps make the past come alive.

In Lancaster, Pennsylvania , King stops at the home of James Buchanan, the bachelor president from 1857 to 1861, who sympathized with the south and loathed abolition. Ending slavery could wait. Of the supreme court’s infamous Dred Scott decision, Buchanan highly approved.

Also in Lancaster, King visits a townhouse once owned by Thaddeus Stevens, the 19th-century Republican congressman and radical abolitionist. At the start of the civil war, Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, viewed the conflict as the vehicle for preserving the Union. He opposed slavery but opposed secession more. For Stevens, slavery was an evil that demanded eradication.

Elsewhere in Pennsylvania , King describes how the ancestors of one town greeted Confederate troops as heroes while another just 20 miles away viewed them as a scourge. Forks in the road are everywhere.

King pays homage to the underground railroad, describing how the Mason-Dixon Line, the demarcation between north and south, free state and slave, came into being. Astronomy and borders had a lot to do with it. All of this emerges from the scenery and places King passes on his way.

Imagining George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware, he delivers a lesson on how such rivers came to be named. Names affixed to bodies of water by Indigenous peoples gave way to Dutch pronunciation, then anglicization. The Delaware, however, derived its moniker from Lord De La Warr, a “dubious aristocrat” otherwise known as Thomas West.

Yet joy and wonder suffuse King’s tale. He smiles on the maker’s handiwork, uneven as it is. American Ramble depicts a stirring sunset and nightfall through the roof-window of a Quaker meeting house. Quiet stands at the heart of the experience. The here and now is loud and messy, but King ably conveys the silent majesty of the moment. The Bible recounts the Deity’s meeting with the prophet Elijah. He was not in the wind, a fire or an earthquake. Rather, He resided in a whisper.

King recalls an earlier time in a Buddhist monastery. Warned that surrounding scenery would detract from solitude and commitment, he nevertheless succumbed. King is nothing if not curious.

The quotidian counts too. He pops cold beers, downs pizzas and snarfs chicken parmesan. A wanderer needs sustenance. He is grateful for the day following the night. Predictability is miraculous, at times invaluable.

King is a cancer survivor and a pilgrim. He is a husband and father, son and brother. Life’s fragility and randomness have left their mark. His malady is in remission but he moves like a man unknowing how long good fortune will last. His voice is a croak, a casualty of Lyme disease. He is restless. Life’s clock runs. He writes of how his brother Kevin lost his battle with a brain tumor.

King puts his head and heart on the page. His life story helps drive the narrative, a mixture of the personal, political and pastoral. But it is not only about him. He meets strangers who become friends, of a sort. At times, people treat him as an oddity – or simply an unwanted presence. More frequently, they are open if not welcoming. As his walk continues, word gets out. Minor celebrity results.

The author is awed by generosity, deprivation and the world. He is moved by a homeless woman and her daughter. Traversing the New Jersey Turnpike presents a near-insurmountable challenge. A mother and son offer him a kayak to paddle beneath the traffic. He accepts.

A Colorado native, King is at home in the outdoors. Nature is wondrous and sometimes disturbing. Rough waters complicate his passages. He studies heaps on a landfill. He meets a New Jerseyan with pickup truck adorned by Maga flags. The gentleman bestows beer, snacks and jokes. King divides the universe into “anywheres” and “somewheres”. He puts himself in the first camp and finds placed-ness all around.

American Ramble captures the religious and demographic topography that marks the mid-Atlantic and north-eastern US. Here, dissenters, Anabaptists, German pietists, Presbyterians and Catholics first landed. King pays homage to their pieces of turf. His reductionism is gentle. He appreciates the legacy of what came before him. Landscapes change, human nature less so, even as it remains unpredictable.

“When I crossed the Delaware two days before,” he writes, “I had entered what I later came to call Presbyteriana, a genteel and horsey patch settled by Presbyterians and Quakers.” Princeton University stands at its heart.

E pluribus unum was tough to pull off when the settlers came. It may even be tougher now. King quotes Nick Rizzo, a denizen of Staten Island, New York City’s Trumpy outer borough: “We are losing our ability to forge any unity at all from these United States.”

Rizzo joined King along the way. In the Canterbury Tales, April stands as the height of spring. It was prime time for religious pilgrimages, “what with Chaucer and all, and it being April”, Rizzo explains.

“Strangers rose to the occasion to provide invaluable moments,” King writes. Amen.

American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal is published in the US by HarperCollins

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A WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the award-winning historian and best-selling author of Gettysburg comes the definitive biography of Robert E. Lee. An intimate look at the Confederate general in all his complexity—his hypocrisy and courage, his inner turmoil and outward calm, his disloyalty and his honor.

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An award-winning scholar explores the sixty-thousand-year history of the Pacific islands in this dazzling, deeply researched account. One of the Best Books of 2021 —  Wall Street Journal The islands of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia stretch across a huge expanse of ocean and encompass a multitude of different peoples.

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The New Rules of Money: A Playbook for Planning Your Financial Future: A Workbook Paperback – December 5, 2023

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• Print length 208 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Clarkson Potter
• Publication date December 5, 2023
• Dimensions 8.03 x 1.06 x 9.01 inches
• ISBN-10 0593234235
• ISBN-13 978-0593234235
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Clarkson Potter (December 5, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593234235
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593234235
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.36 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.03 x 1.06 x 9.01 inches
• #792 in Budgeting & Money Management (Books)
• #3,698 in Success Self-Help

About the authors

Julia carpenter.

Julia Carpenter is an award-winning journalist with work published in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Glamour and more. Her fiction has appeared in Alternative Milk Magazine and been nominated for the Sundress Publication "Best of the Net" Anthology. She lives in Brooklyn with her girlfriend and their rescue dog.

Bourree Lam

I'm the Deputy Coverage Chief of The Wall Street Journal’s Life & Work section. I love writing and talking about money. In my work, I've led the coverage of personal finance topics with an emphasis on accessibility at WSJ, Refinery29, and The Atlantic. My reporting has largely focused on how macroeconomic changes and big business decisions affect the daily lives of Americans.

Since 2010, I've lived in Brooklyn, NY. Now I share my small apartment with my husband and 4-year-old son.

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By Lloyd Grove

• May 21, 2010

Until their tastefully muted leave-taking from Dow Jones & Company and The Wall Street Journal — having sold their birthright for a mess of Rupert Murdoch’s pottage — the Bancrofts could boast a family tradition of extravagant exits. The Boston Brahmin Clarence Barron, a 5-foot-5, 330-pound patriarch known to his descendants as Grandpa (he was so fat he employed a male nurse to button his trousers and tie his shoes), paid $130,000 for Dow Jones in 1902 and pretty much invented financial journalism. He cried out “What’s the news? Are there any mes­sages?” just before expiring in 1928. In 1982, Barron’s rowdy granddaughter Jessie Bancroft Cox, another plump, no-­nonsense Bostonian, was attending a celebration of Dow Jones’s 100th anniversary at the “21” Club when she keeled over after delivering a typically profane lament for her beloved Red Sox.

Grandpa Barron and Mrs. Cox would surely have given Murdoch a run for his money had they been around to resist that media tycoon’s annexation of their cherished kingdom. But by the spring of 2007, Dow Jones was vulnerable to attack after years of management missteps that had left the company with a depressed stock price and no discernible path for expanding beyond its core enterprises, The Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, while competitors like Bloomberg and Reuters were roaring full speed ahead. Clarence Barron’s heirs — including such assorted Bancroft cousins as the Coxes, the Hills and the Goths, scattered in a diaspora from New England to California — were ultimately no match for a brash Austral­ian press lord who encouraged the almost 60,000 employees of his global News Corporation to think of themselves as pirates.

In “War at The Wall Street Journal,” Sarah Ellison has written a definitive, indeed cinematic, account of the News Corporation’s conquest and occupation of this venerable business publication, and of the subterranean battle of motives and moods in the Bancroft family psychodrama. Perhaps “war” — as in a contest between nearly equivalent adversaries — is not the right word. As with the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary, Murdoch’s hegemony was never really in doubt. But it resulted in a clash of cultures (swashbuckling News Corporation meets stuffy Dow Jones) as his trusted lieutenants — the Australian Robert Thomson, appointed editor in chief, and the British-born publisher, Leslie Hinton — transformed The Journal from a niche-market second-read into a general-news-driven first-read, poised to compete head to head with The New York Times. Last month, The Journal even began publishing a metro section.

The Times, Ellison suggests, is Murdoch’s great white whale, a source of bitter resentment to the self-styled billionaire populist. Despite his protestations to the contrary, Murdoch is genuinely bothered by The Times’s occasional tut-tutting about his down-market methods, especially his alleged use of the News Corporation’s media properties to further his political and business interests. “I’d love to buy The New York Times one day. And the next day shut it down as a public service,” he once joked to an audience of business executives. More recently, The Journal cheekily used a photograph of the lower half of the face of Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The Times, to illustrate a weekend feature on women who are attracted to feminine-looking men.

But the central conflict of Ellison’s narrative might be framed as conscience versus cupidity. Money and business were topics to be avoided in the Bancroft family. “My mother would rather discuss pornography,” one relative told Ellison. The “unambitious” and “panache-deprived” Bancrofts — who, unlike such activist newspaper families as the Grahams (of The Washington Post) and the Sulzber­gers, played a minimal role in running their company — were mindful of their legacy as stewards of a public trust. They were sentimentally attached to America’s foremost business paper, which had been a family heirloom for more than a century.

The winner of 33 Pulitzer ­Prizes between 1947 and 2007, The Journal was justly admired for its illuminating investigative reporting, charmingly oddball feature articles and elegant writing, as well as its razor-sharp conservative commentary — not to mention those stippled portraits of newsmakers. The paper could not have had less in common with brazen Murdoch tabloids like The New York Post (whose editor boasts that he would never want a Pulitzer) and The Sun in Britain, with its cavalcade of Page 3 topless beauties.

But with their dividends dwindling and their wealth diluted, the Bancrofts needed ready cash. Murdoch’s astonishing bid of $5 billion, or $60 a share, represented a nearly 70 percent premium over the market price — and a more than half-billion-dollar windfall for the ruling family, which controlled 64 percent of the company through its ­supervoting class of stock. The brute logic of money was bound to triumph.

In March 2007, minutes after a breathless Richard Zannino, Dow Jones’s chief executive, returned from a secret breakfast at which Murdoch had floated his crazy-rich number, Zannino called the Bancrofts’ lead trustee and adviser, Michael Elefante, whose old-line Boston law firm, Hemenway & Barnes, had managed the family’s holdings since World War II and received a 6 percent fee on all income generated. In years past, Roy Hammer, an imperious senior partner at the firm, had dismissed prospective buyers without even informing his clients. But Hammer had retired from the Dow Jones board, and his successor, Elefante, flouted a longstanding Hemenway & Barnes policy by not rejecting Murdoch’s offer out of hand. “That’s it, we’re sold,” Joseph Stern, Dow Jones’s general counsel, declared as soon as Zannino got off the phone.

Ellison, a former reporter at The Journal, covered the takeover in real time for the very newspaper Murdoch was scheming to acquire. She gracefully slips back and forth across enemy lines, gathering intelligence from all sides and using her precious face time with Murdoch and his adult children more profitably than did the media critic Michael Wolff for his self-referential biography, “The Man Who Owns the News.” She spins an absorbing yarn played out on super-yachts and in corporate jets, populated by an irresistible cast of characters — and not only the relentless Murdoch, with his “auburn-dyed hair.” Especially eye-catching is the Katharine Hepburn­esque horsewoman Elisabeth Goth Chelberg, a direct descendant of Clarence Barron’s son-in-law Hugh Bancroft and a beneficiary of the largest family trust, which held $350 million in stock. She had been agitating against Dow Jones’s troubled management since the mid-1990s. Warren Buffett encouraged her to seek a seat on the board, airily dismissing her worries about her checkered past of drug abuse and brushes with the law. “Well, who are they comparing you with, Jesus Christ?” the Oracle of Omaha declared. “Everybody’s got skeletons in the closet. That’s ridiculous.”

The Bancrofts — at least those cousins who felt a tad guilty about cashing out — did what they thought they could to check Murdoch’s sprint to remake The Journal in his own impatient image. Marcus Brauchli, the top-ranking editor at the time of the sale, worked diligently on a detailed editorial-independence agreement that, in a version Murdoch rejected, would have created an advisory board to vet personnel choices and would presumably have protected senior editors from the new owner’s whims. Brauchli tried to meet Murdoch’s mandate that The Journal drop its idiosyncratic identity to cover breaking national stories and beat The Times. But his efforts to placate the boss came to naught. He lasted less than a year before Murdoch forced his resignation.

In the end, Zannino, the chief executive, and Paul Steiger, The Journal’s longtime top editor before Brauchli, made out like bandits, pocketing multiple millions on their way out the door. Brauchli, now executive editor of The Washington Post, consoled himself with a $6.4 million severance package.

The News Corporation hasn’t come out so well. Once Murdoch agreed to eat Dow Jones’s debt, the final sales price was a sticker-shocking $5.6 billion. Barely a year later, the company wrote down half that amount as a loss. But Murdoch, as usual, is putting up a brassy front, lavishing resources on his shiny new toy. It has yet to be determined whether his victory at The Journal will prove disastrously Pyrrhic or, as Murdoch would have it, boldly visionary.

WAR AT THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Inside the struggle to control an american business empire.

By Sarah Ellison

274 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $27

Lloyd Grove writes about the media and politics for The Daily Beast, where he is editor at large.

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Joan Didion’s distinctive prose and sharp eye were tuned to an outsider’s frequency, telling us about ourselves in essays that are almost reflexively skeptical. Here are her essential works .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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Wall Street Journal's Best Books of 2023

The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions (Hardcover)

A Dictator Calls (Paperback)

The Lost Wife: A novel (Hardcover)

An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford (Paperback)

Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict (Hardcover)

Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution (Hardcover)

The Sun Walks Down: A Novel (Hardcover)

The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind (Hardcover)

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (Hardcover)

Children’s Books: Visiting Earth, Channeling Aesop

T here’s a special delight for children in comical picture books that say one thing and mean another—that is, when the words depart from the pictures in such a way that a child feels let in on the joke. With “The Spaceman,” Randy Cecil strikes a beguiling balance between innocent prose and pictures that tell a fuller story.

The hero of the tale is a tiny, bug-eyed humanoid in a silver suit who travels around the universe collecting soil samples. When we meet him, in Mr. Cecil’s vivid, humorous illustrations, the spaceman has landed on Earth. “I must confess, at first glance I thought this a rather ordinary planet,” he tells us, before relating how, in his rapture at seeing “something special” (a crimson flower), he allowed his spaceship to be stolen by a “winged bandit” (a bird), which he then pursued. To the spaceman’s alarm, he soon encountered “a hideous beast, all covered in fur,” which is, of course, a dog. As he becomes ever more happily acquainted with Earth’s natural beauty, he and the dog form a friendship that changes forever the trajectory of the spaceman’s life in this absolute sweetie of a picture book for children ages 4-8.

Fledgling readers at the older end of that age range (more or less, depending on their skill) will meet another pair of unlikely comrades in Kate DiCamillo’s “Orris and Timble: The Beginning,” the opening volume in a planned easy-reader trilogy illustrated by Carmen Mok. Orris is a solitary barn rat, and by all rights Timble, who’s an owl, should be his enemy. Ms. DiCamillo draws explicit parallels with Aesop’s fable of the lion and the mouse when the rat finds the owl snagged by a spring-loaded trap.

In a touch that is not Aesopian (but is entirely DiCamillo-ish), Orris is emboldened to risk freeing Timble because he has taken to heart a sardine-tin slogan: “Make the good and noble choice!” Orris makes the good and noble choice, as surely he must in this calm and earnest telling. Though he’s not the only rat in children’s literature to find utility in advertising—Templeton got there first in “Charlotte’s Web”—he does so with such charm and sensitivity that Orris speedily wins the reader’s affection. Timble is less sharply drawn; no doubt we’ll learn more about him next spring, when the second volume is due to come out.

In “Colossal Words for Kids,” Colette Hiller deploys a mnemonic technique by embedding 75 words in easy-to-remember verses that also explicate their meanings. As a way of fixing the word “extortionate” in a child’s vocabulary, for instance, she writes: “Italian ices are the nicest, / which is most unfortunate. / (We rarely get to have them as / the prices are extortionate.)” She explains “querulous” by describing a boy with words that share its connotations: “Little Gus was querulous. / He whined an awful lot. / He complained when it was cold / and when it was too hot.” Tor Freeman’s goofy, good-natured illustrations add to the fun of this browsing book for word-loving families.

In a picture-book memoir, Ying Chang Compestine tells how she and her parents (barely) managed to survive the Chinese Cultural Revolution. “Growing Up Under a Red Flag,” illustrated by Xinmei Liu, draws readers ages 7-11 into the vortex of suspicion, violence and groupthink that Mao Zedong unleashed in 1966 “to get rid of his opponents and to regain his power over the government,” as the author explains at the outset.

Only 3 at the start of the upheaval, Ms. Compestine grows to adolescence in an increasingly repressive and dysfunctional society. “The year I turned five,” she writes, “we were no longer allowed to read English books or speak in foreign languages.” She may no longer wear her favorite clothes but must dress like everyone else, in drab uniform. Terrifyingly, a member of Mao’s shock troops, a Red Guard, takes over a room in her family’s apartment. When the Red Guards denounce the girl’s father, he’s dragged off to prison as an American spy. A final scene of the family years later, dining in view of the Golden Gate Bridge, allows Ms. Compestine’s grueling account to end on a positive—and for American readers, patriotic—note.

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Week in politics: Biden addresses campus protests, Democratic congressman indicted

by  Scott Simon ,  Ron Elving

India is halfway through the voting season. The ruling BJP is showing signs of worry

by  Scott Simon ,  Diaa Hadid

People visit exhibits inside the Smithsonian Hall of Human Origins, Thursday, July 20, 2023, at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington. Jacquelyn Martin/AP hide caption

Opinion: Ancient gastronomy from mammoths to muesli

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As closing arguments in Google's monopoly trial wrap up, other tech giants watch closely

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Children of sex workers rarely see doctors, global study finds

by  Gabrielle Emanuel

Remembering Paul Auster through his time as an NPR contributor

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One community in israel didn't have access to rocket shelters. they say it's been deadly.

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Jeff beal's new collection of solo piano work speaks to living with multiple sclerosis, witnesses in trump's hush money trial reveal a world of 'extortion'.

by  Scott Simon ,  Andrea Bernstein

Students at some campus anti-war protests are reaching agreements with universities

by  Adrian Florido

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FCC reinstates net neutrality policies after 6 years

Saturday sports: milwaukee bucks end their season, nhl playoffs, astronauts on the moon have a new way to stay fit, and it involves the wall of death, actor chris o'dowd on what to expect from the second season of 'the big door prize', from 'magnum, p.i.' to dancing with royalty, tom selleck shares his journey in new memoir.

by  Scott Simon ,  Ryan Benk ,  Melissa Gray

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