A decade after exploring the diaries of everyone from monarchs to madmen in the much-acclaimed A Book of One's Own, Thomas Mallon now paints a brilliant mural of America itself. Crossing the country from Alaska to Florida, from Hawaii to New England, Mallon gets up close to a dozen different national spectacles, including rocket launches, a rodeo championship, political campaigns, the trial of a bank robber, a small town's summer festival, and a pre-execution vigil at San Quentin. Traveling with him, readers will join a host of characters in unique, moving, and entertaining circumstances. On a winter night near the Arctic Circle, they'll sit at Mary Farrell's blockhouse console as she rides herd on the scientists trying to blast a tiny rocket into the emerald-green aurora borealis. They'll chat with an uncomfortable Dan Quayle ("Would you like a stick of sugarless gum?") aboard Air Force Two; watch some eager auction-goers bid for the late Sir Rex Harrison's toupee; and, fifty years after Pearl Harbor, listen to survivors weep for their lost comrades. Rockets and Rodeos is an extraordinary group portrait of the United States, written with the same wit and elegance, the consistently sharp and affectionate eye, that have won Thomas Mallon high praise for his novels and essays.