Most Helpful Customer Reviews
76 of 93 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Rite of Passage, January 30, 2006
That probably the best book on America was written by a remarkable Frenchman has been known since about 1830, but that fact doesn't seem to bother Americans one whit. On the contrary, we're glad to have it. Especially these days, when the question of American character and integrity seem to be on the chopping block, both here and abroad. But it does seem to irritate the French a good deal, because even though they can lay claim to having authored the best book on America (although one certainly can't forget Mark Twain in this context), they still don't seem to understand it. Alexis de Tocqueville's `Democracy in America' set the bar very high for French intellectuals, and it's become something of a great-great-grandfather complex for them. Tocqueville threw down the gauntlet, and Bernard-Henri Lévy has picked it up in his `American Vertigo.'
Whatever else they disagree on, French intellectuals - of which Bernard-Henri Lévy is certainly one (his initials BHL are often compared in France to a fashion brand, and he prefers shirts that can't be buttoned to turtleneck sweaters) - seem nevertheless destined to share one thing in common: at some or other point in their careers they are compelled to try and 'understand' America. This is the pretext for Lévy's new book, a fast-paced jog through the US that aims to sample the patchwork that makes up the fauna (the political animals, Amish people, strippers, etc.) and the flora (usually restricted to natural wonders like the Space Needle, megachurches and certain well-known prisons) of our American culture, or American Vertigo. Lévy travels to America precisely because he doesn't understand it. America inspires vertigo, and so the title of Lévy's book is already given before he voyages to the New Continent, like a modern day Alexis de Tocqueville who Lévy says explicitly underwrites his entire book, and so invites comparison on a few points. Lévy is decidedly not Tocqueville, of course, who had astute political and cultural things to say regarding the character of early America. Instead, BHL's insights are journalistically profound, or what amounts here to the same thing, profoundly journalistic.
The cultural myopia that Lévy starts out with does not improve during his travels, as is evident on any page of the book, and instead of rejecting it Lévy embraces this myopia as the guiding principle of his voyage, as it allows him the liberty of seeing America differently. This inevitably produces some interesting juxtapositions, but what it does not do - and moreover, it's not meant to - is provide any clarity. Throughout the book, Lévy flits from one venue to the next, with nothing more than something 'interesting' to say - in the way that we say, 'hmm, that's interesting,' and then promptly drop the idea because it really doesn't lead anywhere. Now, this is not a critique of the book per se: Lévy is not aiming for anything more from his thoughts than the production of an interesting read. He doesn't intend to understand America, and that is precisely what his book is about. As the title suggests, it still gives him vertigo. In this sense Lévy sets out in the opposite direction from Tocqueville's `Democracy in America.'
American Vertigo instead intends to be provocative, even if that means simply placing any two things that are American side by side (say, Arlington Cemetery and baseball) and observing: 'isn't that interesting! I wonder if this isn't somehow a key to grasping America?' Unfortunately for us, but more so for the French public who won't know any better in their edition of the book, the fact that Lévy has selected himself as the major guide and muse for his trip to America ultimately leaves the reader none the wiser for having read it. Lévy's no Virgil. But then perhaps that's because Virgil wasn't flashy. He has questions, but he intentionally sets out to raise them, not to answer them. Never mind that Lévy doesn't quite understand what causes the acute American vertigo that he suffers from: he's interested at the moment in the attraction (or distraction) that America affords him with.
Nonetheless, when it comes to America, Lévy likes what he sees, and his anti America-bashing stance has won him friends here in America. This book doesn't bash America, and that does set it apart from most other books written by French intellectuals on the topic of `America' since Tocqueville's praise and his sharp eye for truly defining characteristics of Americans, even if these also included well-perceived faultlines. It's clear that at least one of the reasons why the French are obsessed with 'understanding' America is because Tocqueville kept comparing the French to Americans in his 'Democracy in America.' And as Tocqueville's insights into the characters of both Americans and French are still relevant today, it seems that if one if wanted to read a book that explains America to the French, or America to Americans, Tocqueville's is by far the first and best guide. One thing that Tocqueville decidedly did not suffer from is vertigo. For all of Lévy's gushing about how wonderful a place America is, one gets the sense by the end of the book that for Lévy, it's a nice place to visit but that he wouldn't want to live here.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
49 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
engaging anti-anti-American writing, February 14, 2006
After reading Garrison Keillor's review of this book in the NYT I feel compelled to weigh in my opinion of American Vertigo, by Bernard-Henri Levy. Keillor's review, for those of you who have read it and are consequently skeptical about shelling out the money for this book, was one long shamelessly insulting piece of invective, totally unfair, totally off the mark and illustrating a complete lack of understanding and forebearance. Because Levy was at times (admittedly, quite often) long-winded, philosophically minded, and revelled, it's true, in frequent references (sometimes obscure) to novelists, philosophers, movie directors, to support his theses, Keillor trampled all over this book without digging any deeper. He accused Levy of being superficial, harping on his writing style, and hypocritically wrote an embarassingly superficial review of this admirable book.
What can you expect from this book? Don't go in hoping for all of the answers. No one person, American or not, understands all of the nuances of this broad and diverse country (Whitman of the US: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes"). But I consider this perspective from an outsider commenting on our culture, a la Tocqueville, to be an invaluable insightful piece of journalistic writing. He sets out on a cross-country ramble, with the opinions and misconceptions of his countrymen surely ringing in his ears, and reports with admirable honesty having been shocked by how many of his preconceived notions were utterly shattered. True he is still set, and couldn't possibly budge (what would be the use to us?) from his French-ness. And so his itinerary is surely not one an American would choose in pursuit of cultural enlightenment. He visits seven prisons (hence, in the footsteps of Tocqueville) including Guantanamo Bay, the Mall of America, Cooperstown, the Space Needle, a brothel outside of Las Vegas, a strip-club within it, a gun show, and many other diverse instances of Americana. He interviews a wide swath of people of myriad colors and stripes. The result is a pastiche of observations and reflections, sometimes frustrating, often insightful, poignant, even poetic. For someone who grew up in the Southwest, it was marvelous to read his deconstruction of the sprawling, decentralized cities there, and once again his fresh, outsider's perspective was naive, engaging, insightful, incomplete, but absolutely worthwhile.
It's a shame that so many reviewers on this site gave the book such a crummy rating. Did they read a couple of passages and fling the book into the waste bin after feeling embarassed that this French author was far more cognizant of contemporary and 20th century American literature and politics? Maybe they were encouraged by Keillor's self-indulgent tirade. In any case, I recommend this book to anyone who is willing to sit down, concentrate, and resolve to stick it out to the end.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
35 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The European intellectual's perspective, February 1, 2006
In his review of this book in `NYT Book Review' Garrison Keillor does an old- fashioned hatchet job. He adopts an attitude towards it, and writes one long put- down. Reading the review, and having read many reviews of books in my time, I knew it was unfair without reading one page of the book. Now I have read the book, and I believe the review is unfair, but does hit on a certain truth. In some way Bernard Henri- Levy just does not `get America'. He wasn't born and raised in America, he doesn't really have the feeling or spirit of it. It's not in his writing, not in the tone of what he says. One major example of this for me was in the way he wrote about ` the myth ` of Cooperstown, the way he goes through some strange intellectual exercise to indicate that Abner Doubleday did not invent the game. And he makes this seem as if it is of tremendous importance to most fans. The man does not know what baseball is. His description of Cooperstown, and even of the `Farmer's Museum' there is off. He doesn't have the feel, or the spirit of it, doesn't understand the innocence and dreams connected with it, its special lore, has no sense of the real feel of what a ballfield is, or probably even what a game of `pitch' and `catch' is.
But that said Bernard Henri- Levy does provide in his very heavily researched and studied travel through America a certain kind of European -intellectual's insight and perspective. He does this, commissioned by Atlantic Magazine to go in the footsteps DeTocqueville who provided the great ur- commentary on American society, who set the standard for all sociologists debate in regards to it today. The assignment of course is unfair, and BHL is simply not in the same league , and could not expected to be . Nor does he in some sense really try to be, and admits in the outset that he is not making a literal and direct parallel commentary to his great predecessor countryman's excursion.
Instead he makes a journalistic journey of his own one rich in observations but also perhaps over-rich in philosophical reflection. In the course of this, he truly does his work, travels it seems coast to coast, visits a number of prisons, speaks with some of America's most foremost intellectuals, William Kristol, Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, has a five- minute interview with Presidential Candidate Kerry, speaks with politically involved left- wing movie-stars, Sharon Stone and Warren Beatty, visits a whole host of American cities, finding two he loves, Seattle and Savannah , meets with people in bordellos and shopping - malls, in Indian Reservations and model- cities (Sun- City) .And he writes essentially a long series of vignettes of his encounters and experiences, many of which for me were tremendously informative and convincing.
Inhabitants of Sun- City will not love him, but I found his picture of a sterile segregated artificial Paradise a stark warning of where not to turn in Old Age. I too was taken by his rave description of Seattle which serves as one kind of climax for the book. He writes, "If I had to choose an American city to live in -if I had to pick a place, and only one , where I had the feeling in America of rediscovering my lost bearings -it would be Seattle. But all in all .. If I had to choose one moment in this discovery.....it would be the moment when arriving from Spokane on Highway 90.. I saw floating like a torch between two motionless clouds, in a dark pink sky entirely new to me, the tip of the skyscraper, already lit up, which in my imagination suddenly condensed everything that America has always made me dream of: poetry and modernity, precariousness and technical challenge, lightness of form meshed with a Babel syndrome, city lights, the haunting quality of darkness, tall trees of steel Ever since I was little I've so loved saying "gratte-ciels" - "skyscrapers."
But this passage, however strong, also reveals the weakness of the work. For he speaks of America from the point- of-view and with the baggage of the over- verbal French intellectual. He analyzes and analyzes from the point- of- view questions Americans do not ask about themselves. I found this true even in his writing about two American writers, Hemingway and Fitzgerald who have meant something to him. He asks questions about the kind of medical treatment Hemingway received, and about Fitzgerald's situation when visiting Zelda. He does not touch their literary visions, nor does he for them matter touch upon the great Tradition of American Literature.
He does however provide a meditation on America and its meaning today. In this he presents a long and complex debate with major figures of intellectual history. In one small passage of this debate I found when he is discussing the jihad terrorist war against the West a real sense of understanding America. "I'm thinking of those jihadists about whom you can't say enough times that they aim to destroy what is best about the United States: freedom of speech and thought, equality, women's rights,democracy) -this basic yet decisive detail remains then: in the sheer fact of being American, or at least expressing yourself like one and wanting to be one, there is gentleness, a lightness, an element of freedom and, in a word, of civilization , that
makes this country one of the few countries in the world where, despite everything you can still breathe freely today."
This book has far far more in it than I have indicated in this review, and I believe each and every reader can learn much about America from reading it.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
![American Culture [under construction]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61f%2B7EkDHmL._AA60_.jpg)
