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Wednesday, February 01, 2006
How Not to See AmericaGarrison Keillor on Bernard-Henri Levy's new travel book, "American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville," which explores megachurches and Mount Rushmore, Beverly Hills, gun shows ...
You meet Sharon Stone and John Kerry and a woman who once weighed 488 pounds and an obese couple carrying rifles, but there's nobody here whom you recognize. In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You've lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don't own guns, are non-Amish, and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French. If I ever become incapable of taking down a European swell with a sentence like that, please have me assassinated.
L.A. Observed has a little something from 2004 about M. Levy's research methods.
posted by Michael Scott Moore |
10:30 AM
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