American Vertigo by Bernard-Henri Levy

[novella]

I would like to thank Garrison Keillor for handily slamming this pile of stereotyping shite by Frenchman B-H Levy, "short on facts and long on conclusions." While the book purports to paint a picture of present-day US life, according to Keillor "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. There's no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title.

And on the nonimminent collapse of the US:

Thanks, pal. I don't imagine France collapsing anytime soon either. Thanks for coming. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. For your next book, tell us about those riots in France, the cars burning in the suburbs of Paris. What was that all about? Were fat people involved?

Here's the complete excoriation:


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/books/review/29keillor.html?pagewanted=all