Description
'A Strikingly original analysis of the American Dream at home and the ways it haunts the nights of the developing world - as yearning to share it or as an enacted nightmare of America's dominance of the global economy.' Nadine Gordimer
What America looks like to the rest of the world
Americans rarely used to think about the outside world. As the mightiest nation in history, the United States could do as it pleased. Now Americans have learned the hard way that what outsiders think matters. When terror struck last September 11, author Mark Hertsgaard was completing a trip around the world, gathering perceptions about America from people in fifteen countries. Whether sophisticated business leaders, starry-eyed teenagers, or Islamic fundamentalists, his subjects felt both admiring and uneasy about the United States, enchanted yet bewildered, appalled yet envious. On September 10, the rest of the world harboured plenty of opinions about America - opinions that have only increased in focus and urgency in light of recent events.
This complex catalogue of impressions - good, bad, but never indifferent - is the departure point for a short, pointed essay in the tradition of Common Sense and The Fate of the Earth. How can the world's most open society be so proud of its founding ideals yet so inconsistent in applying them? So loved for its pop culture but so resented for its high-handedness? Exploring such paradoxes, Hertsgaard exposes uplifting and uncomfortable truths that force natives and outsiders alike to see America with fresh eyes.
ISBN:9780312422509
