When I first thumbed through this book in the library, I thought that it was going to be just another fluffy look into travel trailers, or "How we retired early and beat the tax man while spending our kid's inheritance". One page I flipped past had a photo of a real, live housetruck under construction. I checked out the book and was a bit more impressed with it's presentation upon reading it.

This book does a credible job of profiling many aspects of mobile living in very few pages. There is a detailed history of Wally Byam, the founder of Airstream trailers, a dissertation regarding the popularity of now-vintage travel trailers, a bit of a happy-face tale about the "Good Sam Club", and a full chapter explaining the roots of stationary mobile home manufacturers and their rise and fall in desperate economic times.

Life on the road is expounded, with full-timers, week-enders, vacationers, and everything in between. The chapter titled 'Do It Yourself' focuses on those of us who choose to construct our own Wheel Estate (that chapter title is so clever, I wish I'd thought of it), and in addition to the housetruck that caught my eye in the library, there are a couple of example of other rigs. The photo of the retired college professor's bus had duct tape holding the kerosene lamp to the grab bar behind the seat, so not all of the vehicles are of show quality.

The final chapter, 'The Future', is a bit of self-indulgent hand-wringing about the price and availability of gasoline, and some pessimistic conjecture regarding the future of the RV industry in general. Hey, it was 1980, who knew then that we would all get fabulously rich and that the $1.75 a gallon gas prices would hardly make a dent in the consumption patterns of Americans?

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"I have been building ...house cars since 1925 and have tried living on wheels since 1903. Some years before 1925, I talked with three men that I met...fishing on the Ausable River out of Grayling Michigan. They had a house car built on a one-ton Ford truck, with cabinets, beds, grub boxes and a wood stove. I told them that someday I would have one of those. The asked me my name and I told them that I was Mick O'Bird. One man told me to be sure to get a Ford truck. I asked him why. He said "I am Henry Ford, and this is Harvey Firestone and that fellow over there is Thomas Edison" That house car sold me on that kind of camping right there."
Ford, Firestone and Edison were friends and often went on camping trips together.

Michael Aaron Rockland, chairman of the American Studies Department at Rutgers University, has written widely on the subjects of mobility and American popular culture, including several books and numerous magazine articles.