Aatish Taseer with Peter Godwin: The Rootless Elysium

Overview

Acclaimed writers Aatish Taseer and Peter Godwin discuss Taseer’s new book, The Rootless Elysium: America at 250, A Journey — about the allure of the open road and the complicated search for belonging in a restless nation.

What does it mean to become American — and can a nation built on motion, migration, and reinvention ever truly feel like home? Soon after becoming an American citizen, Aatish Taseer climbs into a hulking Dodge Charger in Chicago with a simple plan: drive west along Route 66 and reach the Pacific in ten days. But the quintessentially American road trip soon becomes something stranger and more searching — a journey through the country’s physical landscape and the fault lines of its national identity.

Moving between personal history and cultural inquiry, this is a meditation on migration, identity, and the fragility of the shared ideals that bind America together. Published against the backdrop of America’s 250th anniversary, The Rootless Elysium transforms the great American road trip into an intimate meditation on rootlessness and rootedness, exile and citizenship, and the seductive idea that we can leave the past behind.

Hear Taseer and Godwin explore the contradictions of the American experiment — and what the search for home can reveal about a country forever in the process of reinventing itself.