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American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville
by Bernard-Henri Levy (Translator: Charlotte Mandell)
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Random House (2006-01-24)
ISBN: 1400064341
EAN: 9782286020347
Dewey Decimal #: 917.304931
Binding/Media: Hardcover - 320 pages
Edition: First Edition
Release Date: 2006-01-24
SKU: 44151
Condition: New
Comments: THE HARDCOVER BOOK! GIFT QUALITY. THE UNABRIDGED 1ST EDITION, EARLY PRINT. HARDBACK BOOK, DUST JACKET AND PAGES ARE NEW. RAPID SHIPPING WITH FREE TRACKING, GREAT PACKAGING. PRIORITY AIR MAIL. PK-WV
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
What does it mean to be an American, and what can America be today? To answer these questions, celebrated philosopher and journalist Bernard-Henri Lévy spent a year traveling throughout the country in the footsteps of another great Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America remains the most influential book ever written about our country.
The result is American Vertigo, a fascinating, wholly fresh look at a country we sometimes only think we know. From Rikers Island to Chicago mega-churches, from Muslim communities in Detroit to an Amish enclave in Iowa, Lévy investigates issues at the heart of our democracy: the special nature of American patriotism, the coexistence of freedom and religion (including the religion of baseball), the prison system, the “return of ideology” and the health of our political institutions, and much more. He revisits and updates Tocqueville’s most important beliefs, such as the dangers posed by “the tyranny of the majority,” explores what Europe and America have to learn from each other, and interprets what he sees with a novelist’s eye and a philosopher’s depth.
Through powerful interview-based portraits across the spectrum of the American people, from prison guards to clergymen, from Norman Mailer to Barack Obama, from Sharon Stone to Richard Holbrooke, Lévy fills his book with a tapestry of American voices–some wise, some shocking. Both the grandeur and the hellish dimensions of American life are unflinchingly explored. And big themes emerge throughout, from the crucial choices America
faces today to the underlying reality that, unlike the “Old World,” America remains the fulfillment of the world’s desire to worship, earn, and live as one wishes–a place, despite all, where inclusion remains not just an ideal but an actual practice.
At a time when Americans are anxious about how the world perceives them and, indeed, keen to make sense of themselves, a brilliant and sympathetic foreign observer has arrived to help us begin a new conversation about the meaning of America.
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Customer Reviews
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Confused and Confusing
Rating  (3)
Date: 2010-02-23
I found "American Vertigo" to be a puzzling book. It was, initially, a journey in the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville. It then seemed to morph into a traditional travelogue as Bernard-Henri Levy criss crossed America travelling mainly by road and meeting a wonderful assortment of Americans from all walks of life. He then concludes the book with a confusing piece of analysis which was, frankly, confusing. Indeed, it was only in the final pages where he wrote a brief postscript that the narrative gained any semblance of consistency. So, all in all, a less than satisfying read.
I had expected much more. Tocqueville was an early observer of the American experiment. For another Frenchman to try to rework an earlier master was probably a clever idea. Levy comes with a great resume and should have been able to handle this task with ease. However, the result is disappointing. It is probably the travelogue where the book is its most readable. Levy has an unexpected knack of seeing the interesting within the mundane. He has a keen eye and a fluid style. It's a pity that the book couldn't have been more a travelogue than a political treatise. In the former, Levy excels while in the latter he becomes confused.
My criticisms notwithstanding, Levy does manage to redeem himself at the book's end. Here, he briefly discusses Hurricane Katrina and the tragedy of New Orleans. This one event did so much to show the very best and the very worst of America all at once. The best being the willingness of people to pitch in and help. The worst being the pathetic incompetence of its then President. America deserved better than the negligence that its government showed in the wake of Katrina. Levy does well to articulate this point.
Overall, this book is mixed. It will anger some, encourage others and simply confuse many. I had expected more. Levy fails to deliver.
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Kudos to the One Star Reviewers
Rating  (1)
Date: 2009-05-25
4 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
Sometimes the movie is better than the book. In this case the one star reviews are far more articulate,nuanced,and insightful than this pompous screed of a trite rite of passage from this pretentious icon of the French.I started reading this book hoping for a "Blue Highways" but found myself slogging through page after page of utterly self absorbed and myopic self musings.Mon Dieu!! Could this be? Perhaps it was I who missed the profundity of the great "BHL" ( the name itself pretentious and revealing).So I then checked the reviews. How typically American,BHL would probably sneer,"ready ,fire,aim." The reviews gave me final dispensation and validation to trash this piece of tripe. This book is so bad it tempts one to go on and on with endless BHLesque adjectives so I will not.BHL, I have read Toqueville,and you ain't him ,bud.Hats off to all you guys and gals of the intelligent one star reviews.
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Insightful Vignettes into America
Rating  (4)
Date: 2009-03-16
0 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
This is a book I've been meaning to read for a long time but it took me a while to get my hands on the original French version. I thought that a book written by a French intellectual and philosopher offering ruminations about America deserved to be read in French... A friend finally got me a copy in France last month and I took it with me on my around-the-world trip this month.
Bernard-Henry Levy (henceforth, BHL) is somewhat of a celebrity in France (perhaps the only country in the world where a philosopher can become a celebrity). In recent years, he has moved away from writing "pure" philosophical works towards a more journalistic role. In 2002 he spent almost a year, travelling to Pakistan several times to investigate the murder of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter that was beheaded by Muslim fanatics. He summarised his findings in a book (Who Killed Daniel Pearl?) in which he minces no words when describing the lawlessness of the Pakistani regime. I vividly recall one sentence from that book (and I'm quoting from memory): "of all the delinquent countries in the world, Pakistan is the most delinquent of all". This was written, mind you, at at time when Pakistan was the US's primary ally in the fight against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
BHL embarked on a year-long journey arounnd the US and wrote his observations in American Vertigo. The project was financed by the Atlantic Monthly journal, which asked BHL to follow the footsteps of Alexis De Tocqueville, the French historian who travelled to America in the early 19th century and wrote an analysis of American civic life in the monumental work Democracy in America, considered one of the classic books in political thought. The idea was for BHL to retrace Tocqueville's journey and provide observations about life in America almost 200 years later. (On a side note: why don't I get offers to travel the world for free for a year? I guess my ruminations are not, sadly, as in demand as BHL's...).
The book turned out to be very different from what I thought it would be like. Instead of a long philosophical treatise about the US, the book is a collection of short vignettes, each 2-3 pages long, about the various encounters BHL had during his journey. Having said that, the last third of the book is a heavy-going "summary" of the journey, more typical to BHL's previous writings.
The journey took place around election time in 2004. BHL covered many walks of American life: politics (he met, among others, Obama, Clinton and Kerry), Hollywood (Sharon Stone, Warren Beatty), prisons (the original aim of Tocqueville was to study the American penitentiary system), entertainment (Vegas, a brothel in Nevada), sports (Baseball Hall of Fame), religion (from born-again evangelists to Brooklyn Jews to Mormons), US history (Mount Rushmore) and much much more. Each vignette describes shortly what he experienced and then expands on the subject by putting it into context. "The big picture" is a motive that runs throughout the book, with BHL trying to frame each experience within the theory he builds for the American experience.
And the theory is as follows: America is indeed an empire, but not of the sort Rome was. Its fierce protection of individualism, coupled with a deep sense of integrity and accountability, make it a power to be reckoned with despite the predictions of its decline. It is a land of contradictions: puritanism coupled with promiscuity, religious fervour coupled with materialism of the lowest kind, isolationism coupled with a sense of global duty. As dysfunctional as America is, BHL believes it will endure. He is an "anti anti-American" and repeatedly berates his compatriots for being so automatically against anything American and for falsely predicting the failure of the American model.
As impartial as BHL tries to be, his love for America is apparent throughout the book (although I think he will refuse to admit "love" is the appropriate word). He writes lovingly about Seattle, calling it the one place he would choose to live in if he were to move to the US, only to trade it later in the book with Savannah, Georgia. All in all, I don't think he was successful in "retracing the footsteps" of Tocqueville, but nevertheless this is still an interesting and stimulating book.
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Tartarin in the US
Rating (1)
Date: 2008-07-04
11 out of 13 customers found this reveiw helpful
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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Nice surprise.
Rating  (5)
Date: 2007-04-15
4 out of 7 customers found this reveiw helpful
The book is very well written, concise and not not becoming destructed by theoretical excursions. The fact that philosophy ala BHL is not ex cathedra discurse but field research gives freshness and sharp observations to the reader. Avoiding to polarize between "uncivilized americans" and civilized europeans credits BHL with objectivity and wide spectrum of participation from every day life up to intellectuals, politicians and even Hollywood opinions. Good contribution to bridge the gaps of recent years between USA and Europe away from chronical antiamericanism syndrom
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