By Motor to the Golden Gate Book

While Baltimore-born Emily Post is known best for her encomiums on manners, she was also a tremendously gifted (and overlooked) Gilded Age author of both fiction and non-fiction, _By Motor to the Golden Gate_ being one of the best among the latter. It is a charming, insightful, and elegant work that is part memoir, part reportage, and part public history, about her intracontinental trek from New York to San Francisco by car in 1915. Its greatest value, in my opinion, is the snapshot it provides of America in the years immediately before it entered World War I, of only the sort that an especially trenchant and informed observer can provide. Post has a telling eye for detail and an infectious sense of humor that makes the work enjoyable and informative over an extended sitting or dipping into for a chapter or two. It is a must-read for historians of America during the period, for anyone interested in the Gilded Age on this side of the Atlantic, or for anyone who just appreciates wit and erudition.

My reason for not giving the book 5 stars rests entirely upon the editing of this, the only available edition (McFarland & Co., 2004). The editor has done Post no favors in providing introductory material that is disorganized, footnotes that burden the text and are of questionable value, and, for all that, leave the text itself rife with proofing mistakes that should have been caught before the first note was written. Instead, the editor appears to be more in inserting her own problematic sense of what readers should know about Post and her adventure. By all means, read the book, but do yourself a favor by doing what eventually did and skip the ponderous editorial apparatus in favor of reading only Post's words. Doing so will lessen your time with the splendid Ms. Post, which is too bad, but, as she might say, at least that time will be cherce.