American Vertigo

What does it mean to be an American, and what can America be today? To answer these questions, celebrated philosopher and journalist Bernard-Henri Lévy spent a year traveling throughout the country in the footsteps of another great Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America remains the most influential book ever written about our country. The result is American Vertigo, a fascinating, wholly fresh look at a country we sometimes only think we know. From Rikers Island to Chicago mega-churches, from Muslim communities in Detroit to an Amish enclave in Iowa, Lévy investigates issues at the heart of our democracy: the special nature of American patriotism, the coexistence of freedom and religion (including the religion of baseball), the prison system, the “return of ideology” and the health of our political institutions, and much more. He revisits and updates Tocqueville’s most important beliefs, such as the dangers posed by “the tyranny of the majority,” explores what Europe and America have to learn from each other, and interprets what he sees with a novelist’s eye and a philosopher’s depth. Through powerful interview-based portraits across the spectrum of the American people, from prison guards to clergymen, from Norman Mailer to Barack Obama, from Sharon Stone to Richard Holbrooke, Lévy fills his book with a tapestry of American voices–some wise, some shocking. Both the grandeur and the hellish dimensions of American life are unflinchingly explored. And big themes emerge throughout, from the crucial choices America faces today to the underlying reality that, unlike the “Old World,” America remains the fulfillment of the world’s desire to worship, earn, and live as one wishes–a place, despite all, where inclusion remains not just an ideal but an actual practice. At a time when Americans are anxious about how the world perceives them and, indeed, keen to make sense of themselves, a brilliant and sympathetic foreign observer has arrived to help us begin a new conversation about the meaning of America.

What does it mean to be an American, and what can America be today? To answer these questions, celebrated philosopher and journalist Bernard-Henri Lévy spent a year traveling throughout the country in the footsteps of another great Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America remains the most influential book ever written about our country. The result is American Vertigo, a fascinating, wholly fresh look at a country we sometimes only think we know. From Rikers Island to Chicago mega-churches, from Muslim communities in Detroit to an Amish enclave in Iowa, Lévy investigates issues at the heart of our democracy: the special nature of American patriotism, the coexistence of freedom and religion (including the religion of baseball), the prison system, the “return of ideology” and the health of our political institutions, and much more. He revisits and updates Tocqueville’s most important beliefs, such as the dangers posed by “the tyranny of the majority,” explores what Europe and America have to learn from each other, and interprets what he sees with a novelist’s eye and a philosopher’s depth. Through powerful interview-based portraits across the spectrum of the American people, from prison guards to clergymen, from Norman Mailer to Barack Obama, from Sharon Stone to Richard Holbrooke, Lévy fills his book with a tapestry of American voices–some wise, some shocking. Both the grandeur and the hellish dimensions of American life are unflinchingly explored. And big themes emerge throughout, from the crucial choices America faces today to the underlying reality that, unlike the “Old World,” America remains the fulfillment of the world’s desire to worship, earn, and live as one wishes–a place, despite all, where inclusion remains not just an ideal but an actual practice. At a time when Americans are anxious about how the world perceives them and, indeed, keen to make sense of themselves, a brilliant and sympathetic foreign observer has arrived to help us begin a new conversation about the meaning of America.

Depuis la deuxième guerre d'Irak - et même bien avant... - les Etats-Unis occupent, dans l'imaginaire mondial, une place symbolique qui dépasse largement les notions de puissance, de politique, de géographie. L'Amérique, en vérité, est devenue un concept, une « région de l'âme », une matrice de passions et de phobies dont le déploiement contradictoire n'en finit pas d'infuser nos propres débats. C'est, précisément, cette réalité ontologiquement diverse que Bernard-Henri Lévy a voulu cerner, observer, penser, dans ce livre où le reportage se mêle à la réflexion, et où le pittoresque emprunte à la philosophie de l'histoire. A l'origine, ce livre est né d'une « commande » de l'influent magazine « Atlantic Monthly » : demander à un célèbre intellectuel français de visiter l'Amérique et de donner sens à ce pays-continent en refaisant - en plus vaste - le fameux voyage qu'Alexis Tocqueville avait entrepris au début du XIXème siècle, à partir duquel il avait écrit son désormais classique « De la démocratie en Amérique ». Pendant une année, B.-H. Lévy a ainsi sillonné les Etats-Unis. Plus de vingt mille kilomètres d'est en ouest et du nord au sud, la plupart du temps par la route : de Rikers Island à Chicago, des communautés islamiques de Detroit à une enclave Amish de l'Iowa, l'auteur interroge la nature du patriotisme américain, la coexistence de la liberté comme de la religion, le système pénitenciaire, la « tyrannie de la majorité », le retour en force de l'idéologie... B.-H.L. a rencontré tous les visages de l'Amérique : les illustres, les anonymes, ceux du désert ou des mégapoles. De Sharon Stone à une veuve de mineur du Wisconsin, d'un milliardaire philantrope à Norman Mailer, de Woody Allen à un « homeless » de Californie, d'Hillary Clinton à un contestataire turbulent, de Barack Ohama, la star montante de la politique, à la pensionnaire d'un bordel du Nevada, il écrit la comédie humaine de ce pays-continent. D'où la vitalité prodigieuse de ce « reportage philosophique » qu'on dévore, page après page, avec un enthousiasme qui ne se dément jamais. Un oeil de romancier, et une profondeur de penseur. Les conclusions de ce voyage ? B.-H.L. les tire en chemin, et elles sont souvent contradictoires. A l'heure où la « démocratie en Amérique » est de plus en plus contestée, ce livre atteste, au contraire, de sa prodigieuse vitalité. A cet égard, l'épilogue substantiel de ce livre (une centaine de pages) permet au « philosophe » de reprendre le pas sur le « journaliste » et le final de cet ouvrage conduit son lecteur au coeur des grands débats - des thèses de Fukuyama ou Huntington aux arrières-pensées des « Néo-conservateurs » - dont la complexité, bien souvent, gouverne le destin du monde.

Just as every society has an economic and political structure, so too every society has a gender structure. Barbara Risman's original research on single fathers, married baby boom mothers, and heterosexual egalitarian couples and their children, reported in this intriguing book, weaves together qualitative and quantitative data from surveys, interviews, and observation. Risman shows how gender as a social structure affects individuals, organizes expectations attached to social positions, and becomes an integral part of social institutions. She provides empirical evidence that human beings are capable of enduring and affective intimate relationships without gender as the central organizing mechanism. The data also strongly indicate that men and women are capable of changing gendered ways of being throughout their lives. In her analysis of nontraditional families, Risman finds that gender expectations can be overcome if couples are willing to flout society and risk "gender vertigo." Most children of such families adopt their parents' beliefs about gender, but they do struggle with the contradictions between parental ideology and folk knowledge and expectations in peer relationships. The author argues that we can create a just society only by creating a society in which gender is an irrelevant category for social life--a post-gender society.

Born to immigrant parents during World War II and coming of age during the 1950s, DeSalvo finds herself rebelling against a script written by parental and societal expectations. In her revealing family memoir, DeSalvo sifts through painful memories to give voice to all that remained unspoken and unresolved in her life: a mother's psychotic depression, a father's rage and violent rigidity, a sister's early depression and eventual suicide, and emerging memories of childhood incest. At times humorous and often brutally candid, DeSalvo also delves through the more recent conflicts posed by marriage, motherhood, and the crisis that started her on the path of her life's work: becoming a writer in order to excavate the meaning of her life and community. In Vertigo, Louise DeSalvo paints a striking picture of the easy freedom of the husband and fatherless world of working-class Hoboken, New Jersey, the neighborhood of her early childhood, where mothers and children had an unaccustomed say in the running of their lives while men were off defending their country, but were jolted back into submission when World War II ended. Hoboken was not a place where girls were encouraged to develop their minds, or their independent spirits, yet it is that tenement-dotted city with its pulse and energy, wonderful Italian pastry, and sidewalk roller-skating contests, and not suburban Ridgefield, where the family moves when Louise is seven, that claims Louise's heart. Written with an honesty that is as rare as it is unsettling, Vertigo also speaks to broader truths about the impact of ethnicity, class, and gender in American life. Offering inspiration and a healthy dose of subversion, this personal story of a writer's life is also a study of the alchemy between lived experience and creativity, and the life-transforming possibilities of this process.

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS A riveting study of the intersections between Jewish and Latin American culture, this immigrant family memoir recounts history with psychological insight and the immediacy of a thriller. In Nuestra América, eminent anthropologist and historian Claudio Lomnitz traces his grandparents’ exile from Eastern Europe to South America. At the same time, the book is a pretext to explain and analyze the worldview, culture, and spirit of countries such as Peru, Colombia, and Chile, from the perspective of educated Jewish emigrants imbued with the hope and determination typical of those who escaped Europe in the 1920s. Lomnitz’s grandparents, who were both trained to defy ghetto life with the pioneering spirit of the early Zionist movement, became intensely involved in the Peruvian leftist intellectual milieu and its practice of connecting Peru’s indigenous past to an emancipatory internationalism that included Jewish culture and thought. After being thrown into prison supposedly for their socialist leanings, Lomnitz’s grandparents were exiled to Colombia, where they were subject to its scandals, its class system, its political life. Through this lens, Lomnitz explores the almost negligible attention and esteem that South America holds in US public opinion. The story then continues to Chile during World War II, Israel in the 1950s, and finally to Claudio’s youth, living with his parents in Berkeley, California, and Mexico City.

This book examines what literature and film reveal about the urban USA. Subjects include culture, class, race, crime, and disaster.

An enduringly brilliant tale of trial and triumph, set in America in the 1920s, from the author of 4 3 2 1: A Novel Paul Auster, the New York Times-bestselling author of The New York Trilogy, presents a dazzling, picaresque novel set in the late 1920s – the era of Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, and Al Capone. Walter Claireborne Rawley, renowned nationwide as "Walt the Wonder Boy," is a Saint Louis orphan rescued from the streets by a mysterious Hungarian Jew, Master Yehudi, who teaches Walt to walk on air. Master Yehudi brings Walt into a Kansas circus troupe consisting of Mother Sioux and Aesop, a young black genius. The vaudeville act takes them across a vast and vibrant country, through mythic Americana where they meet and fall prey to sinners, thieves, and villains, from the Kansas Ku Klux Klan to the Chicago mob. Walt's rise to fame and fortune mirrors America's own coming of age, and his resilience, like that of the nation, is challenged over and over and over again.