Event Calendar

Name: Nonesuch Nonfiction Book Club
Start: 2023-05-18T21:00+00:00
End: 2023-05-18T22:30+00:00
Location: Palm Springs Public Library - The Learning Center

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Nonesuch Nonfiction Book Club

Date: 05/18/2023 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM 05/18/2023 2:00 PM 05/18/2023 3:30 PM
Location: Palm Springs Public Library - The Learning Center
300 S. Sunrise Way
Palm Springs, California 92262

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Nonesuch Nonfiction Book Club

Let the adventure begin. Join PSPL's newest book club: the Nonesuch Nonfiction Book Club led by Sean R. Corbin, a PSPL Librarian.

The group meets the 3rd Thursday of the month September through May in The Learning Center at the Palm Springs Public Library from 2 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.

To receive meeting information and join the email list for the Nonesuch Nonfiction Book Club, please email Sean R. Corbin in advance of the meeting at sean.corbin@palmspringsca.gov

May 18, 2023

Don't Make Me Pull Over!: An Informal History of the Family Road Trip by Richard Ratay

— “A lighthearted, entertaining trip down Memory Lane” (Kirkus Reviews), Don’t Make Me Pull Over! offers a nostalgic look at the golden age of family road trips—before portable DVD players, smartphones, and Google Maps.

The birth of America’s first interstate highways in the 1950s hit the gas pedal on the road trip phenomenon and families were soon streaming—sans seatbelts!—to a range of sometimes stirring, sometimes wacky locations. In the days before cheap air travel, families didn’t so much take vacations as survive them. Between home and destination lay thousands of miles and dozens of annoyances, and with his family Richard Ratay experienced all of them—from being crowded into the backseat with noogie-happy older brothers, to picking out a souvenir only to find that a better one might have been had at the next attraction, to dealing with a dad who didn’t believe in bathroom breaks.

Now, decades later, Ratay offers “an amiable guide…fun and informative” (New York Newsday) that “goes down like a cold lemonade on a hot summer’s day” (The Wall Street Journal). In hundreds of amusing ways, he reminds us of what once made the Great American Family Road Trip so great, including twenty-foot “land yachts,” oasis-like Holiday Inn “Holidomes,” “Smokey”-spotting Fuzzbusters, twenty-eight glorious flavors of Howard Johnson’s ice cream, and the thrill of finding a “good buddy” on the CB radio.

An “informative, often hilarious family narrative [that] perfectly captures the love-hate relationship many have with road trips” (Publishers Weekly), Don’t Make Me Pull Over! reveals how the family road trip came to be, how its evolution mirrored the country’s, and why those magical journeys that once brought families together—for better and worse—have largely disappeared.

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