The intelligent American's guide to Europe [Hardcover]

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 560 pages
• Publisher: Arlington House (1979)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0870004190
• ISBN-13: 978-0870004193
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,128,830 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Three weeks isn't enough!, October 11, 2004

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Andrew S. Rogers (Stamford, Connecticut) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The intelligent American's guide to Europe (Hardcover)

After years of unsuccessfully trying to track down a copy of this book to purchase, I finally had the sense to try inter-library loan. That secured the book for me, but only for three weeks. And it wasn't enough!

That's because this book is, in many ways, typical Kuehnelt-Leddihn. Its prose is fact-filled, thought-provoking, erudite and polyglot. And, of course, dense with footnotes (1,289, in fact). You need to stop frequently to process the argument just presented to you. It's hard to do that with a due date looming just ahead.

This book is divided into three sections. The first, "Europe in the Round," analyses the continent through the lenses of geography, "races, ethnic units, nations," religions, nationalities and languages, political structures, and other general themes. In the middle section, K-L takes us on a country-by-country tour of Europe as it existed in the late 1970s. Each country is presented thoroughly, but again with a focus on languages, ethnicities, and religion as well as on political institutions and development. While every country's chapter is educational, I think the most thorough, and most interesting, parts were K-L's looks at France, "the Germanies" [a term he told us back in "Menace of the Herd" was a more accurate description of the region than simply "Germany" -- and that was before the division into BRD and DDR!], and Spain.

The final section, "America, Europe, and the Continuing War," looks at America's relations with the Continent through history, with a special focus on the Cold War. It's this section that will be most familiar to students of K-L, for here he most explicitly interweaves the themes of his other works into the specific lessons the "intelligent American" should carry away about Europe.

And what are those lessons? As K-L writes at the start of this third section, "I would be very happy if, by presenting my ideas, notions, and data -- all totally insufficient to convey real knowledge -- I have helped to create the impression that Europe, which figures so prominently in American foreign policy, is an extremely complex part of the world and that anyone who wants to deal with European affairs has to be some sort of scholar, traveler, and linguist" (p. 393). A K-L, in short. As he did in "Leftism Revisited," the author is especially keen to illustrate how Americans' traditional lack of understanding of European history, culture, language, and even geography have had dire consequences over the last century. The general American sense that "Everyone is pretty much like everyone else" and "Everyone would be happier if their country was more like the USA" bear little connection to the realities of Europe.

As ever, K-L's arguments are counterintuitive to the average American, and also sometimes idiosyncratic. Readers who cherish the nostrums about democracy, "progress," and American exceptionalism lovingly peddled in our nation's classrooms will probably find a good deal of this book profoundly disquieting. Which is no doubt precisely what the author intended.

Presumably, encouraging other readers to track down copies of this book may make it harder for me to secure one for myself. But I'll take that chance because I think this volume is an essential addition to the shelves of any K-L student. And even given the many changes that have taken place in Europe since 1979, this is still a valuable, if sorely neglected, resource for students of European history, politics, and culture. K-L's focus is on things that last far longer than mere political borders or ruling parties, and that makes this impressive, educational, and even entertaining book a useful resource for many years to come.