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Editorial Reviews
The Atlantic Monthly, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
"America," Winston Churchill said, "stands at this moment at the summit of the world." The moment was August, 1945. Nazi Germany had fallen, the atomic bomb had been dropped, imperial Japan was about to surrender, the European Allies were battered and spent, and the United States bestrode the narrow world. It was a new America, hardly known to the world--or to itself. This was the America that John Gunther portrayed in the vivid and acute reportage of Inside U.S.A., which is to be reissued this month by the New Press.
"America," Winston Churchill said, "stands at this moment at the summit of the world." The moment was August, 1945. Nazi Germany had fallen, the atomic bomb had been dropped, imperial Japan was about to surrender, the European Allies were battered and spent, and the United States bestrode the narrow world. It was a new America, hardly known to the world--or to itself. This was the America that John Gunther portrayed in the vivid and acute reportage of Inside U.S.A., which is to be reissued this month by the New Press.
This book, now half a century old, is an astonishing tour de force. It presents a shrewd, fast-moving, sparkling panorama of the United States at this historic moment of apparent triumph. . . .
Inside U.S.A. does not pretend to be a profound analysis of American civilization, in the manner of Tocqueville and Bryce. But Gunther had his own quiver of penetrating questions. His objective was to identify the forces that made "this incomparable Golconda of a country" move. Wherever he went, he asked, Who runs this state or city? What are the basic and irreversible sources of power--social power, economic power, political power? He interviewed more than 900 people and emerged with more than a million words of notes. And he did it all himself, without professional researchers or stringers. . . .
Inside U.S.A. is far from a panegyric. Gunther listed "the worst American characteristics--covetousness, ignorance, absence of esthetic values, get-rich-quickism, bluster, lack of vision, lack of foresight, excessive standardization, and immature and undisciplined social behavior." America was still "an enormously provincial nation," he wrote. "I do not know any country that is so ignorant about itself." Have we improved noticeably in the half century since?
Sinclair Lewis
The richest treasure-house of facts about America that has ever been published, and probably the most spirited and interesting.
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