"The author deftly leads us along the road from New York to Boston, taking us past the infant stagecoach lines, the first fires of Revolution, Abraham Lincoln figuring out his Presidential campaign and the armies that followed once he'd won it, the brief hegemony and slow withering of the railroad, the decidedly mixed blessing of the interstate.... Jaffe sets forth a persuasive case that the old Post Road runs through us all, and his scores of lively set-pieces coalesce into the tremendous story, told at once intimately and spaciously, of the rise of American civilization."—Richard Snow