In the summer of 2016, a newly retired law school professor bought a 1999 Ford Coachman camper van and drove into America's heartland. His intention was to investigate the people, places, culture, and history that produced the competing narratives dominating the nation's social and political discourse. He also hoped to ruminate on the meaning and trajectory of his own life's journey.

Travels with Vamper is not just a road trip memoir, not just a reflection on our nation's history that led to the era of Donald Trump, and not just a baby boomer's reckoning with the life behind him and the years ahead. It is all those things.

Written by George Critchlow, who spent a career studying how law, people, and society interact, the book is a blending of people, places, historical anecdotes, political observations, legal tales, and personal history. With intention, honesty, and self-disclosure, Critchlow zeros in on the things that divide and unite us: race, religion, rugged individualism, community, love, fear, sexual orientation, war, work, family, and growing old.

Critchlow's tale moves fluidly and easily from place to place, idea to idea, memory to memory, and song to song. It is intermittently funny, sober, provocative, sentimental, poetic, and buoyant.

The book concludes with an epilogue that annotates the road trip with a forward-looking assessment of the man who, in 2017, became the 46th president of the United States. Critchlow offers insights and perspectives that are useful in understanding the implications of reelecting the same man eight years later.