Lessons in Persuasion: Creative Nonfiction/ Pittsburgh Connections Book

"The Ride of Our Lives" wasn't what I thought it would be, but it is what it says it is. I was expecting one of those road trip stories where you got a lot of "compare and contrast" between the land and the people met along the way. There's a bit of that here, but mostly it is a record of the stories a family tells themselves, how the ancestors came to America, how Mike got his first job in TV, how everyone met and got married. The travel wasn't the centerpiece of the book, the family stories were. You also got a lot of description of the family members as characters, the grandpa who sings at the drop of a hat, the hard driving TV reporter who has to do two things at once. It was like binge-viewing something like "The Waltons" - you got to know a little about everyone and a lot about some, and you also know how the generations all interacted. Leonard is like a John Boy who has become a successful network TV reporter, so you do get stories of a well-to-do family, but also of family members borrowing to make ends meet and working for little pay to prove their worth - typical Walton storylines. If you have an appreciation for those kinds of stories, you will enjoy this book.