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American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville Hardcover – January 24, 2006

2.9 out of 5 stars 63 customer reviews

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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Random House (January 24, 2006)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1400064341
  • ISBN-13: 978-1400064342
  • Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 1.1 x 9.6 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (63 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #309,751 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

Format: Paperback
As a French citizen who likes the USA, I am not a supporter of Bags Of Wind. BHL has for a long time decided to stop thinking. "American Vertigo" is another expression of the wind which blows in the brain of this pedantic writer.

I totally agree with the good criticism written by William Grimes "A Modern-Day Tocqueville Finds an Uncertain America", February 4, 2006 in the New-York Times. I quote an extract of this relevant analysis.

"Mr. Lévy is, in some ways, a good traveling companion. He takes a keen interest in American politics, and he loves American literature. His voyage of discovery owes as much to Jack Kerouac or Walt Whitman as it does to Tocqueville, a writer whom, he notes in his preface, he barely knew before setting out. But because he lives almost entirely inside his head, he does a remarkably poor job at communicating the sights, sounds and smells of American life. There are many moments, riding in the car with him, that you want to tell him to shut up for five minutes and take a good look at what's out the window.

He is lazy. Tocqueville, faced with the bewildering logic of American politics and American habits, rolled up his sleeves and tried to account for what he saw. Mr. Lévy dashes off a few lines, shrugs his shoulders and tosses out rhetorical questions. Some are long and involved, others quite brief, like the "Who knows ?" that caps his musings on the inner life of President Bush. At least half of the provocative questions that make up "American Vertigo" should have been written down as homework assignments for the author rather than lobbed in the face of the reader. He does not bother to chase down elusive facts, like who finances Medicaid. Instead, he wraps them in an "I'm told," or "it's said that."
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Format: Hardcover
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.
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Format: Hardcover
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.
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