{"product_id":"american-vertigo-isbn-9780812974713","title":"American Vertigo","description":"What does it mean to be an American, and what can America be today?\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003eTo 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.  \u003cbr\u003eThe result is\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003eAmerican 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. \u003cbr\u003eThrough 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 \u003cbr\u003efaces 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.\u003cbr\u003eAt 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.“Bernard-Henry Lévy does nothing that goes unnoticed. He is an intellectual adventurer who brings publicity to unfashionable political causes.”\u003cbr\u003e–The New York TimesBernard-Henry Lévy is a philosopher, journalist, activist, and filmmaker. He was hailed by Vanity Fair magazine as “Superman and prophet: we have no equivalent in the United States.” Among his dozens of books are Barbarism with a Human Face and Who Killed Daniel Pearl? His writing has appeared in a wide range of publications throughout Europe and the United States. His films include the documentaries Bosna! and A Day in the Death of Sarajevo. Lévy is co-founder of the antiracist group SOS Racism and has served on diplomatic missions for the French government.chapter I\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    First Visions\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    (from Newport to Des Moines)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A People and Its Flag\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was here, not too far south of Boston, on the East Coast, which   still bears the mark of Europe so clearly, that Alexis de Tocqueville   came ashore: Newport, Rhode Island. This well-kept Easton’s Beach.   These yachts. These Palladian mansions and painted wooden houses that   remind me of the beach towns of Normandy. A naval museum. An athenaeum   library. Bed-and-breakfasts with a picture of the owner displayed   instead of a sign. Gorgeous trees. Tennis courts. A Georgian-style   synagogue, exhibited as the oldest in the United States: with its   well-polished pale wood, its fluted columns, its spotless black rattan   chairs, its large candelabra, its plaque engraved with clear-cut   letters in memory of Isaac Touro and the six or seven great spiritual   leaders who succeeded him, its American flag standing next to the Torah   scroll under glass, it seems to me, on the contrary, strangely modern.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And then, precisely, the flags: a riot of American flags, at   crossroads, on building fronts, on car hoods, on pay phones, on the   furniture displayed in the windows along Thames Street, on the boats   tied to the dock and on the moorings with no boats, on beach umbrellas,   on parasols, on bicycle saddlebags—everywhere, in every form, flapping   in the wind or on stickers, an epidemic of flags that has spread   throughout the city. There are also, as it happens, a lot of Japanese   flags. A Japanese cultural festival is opening, with exhibitions of   prints, sushi samples on the boardwalk, sumo wrestling in the street,   barkers enticing passersby to come see these wonders, these monsters:   “Come on! Look at them—all white and powdered! Three hundred pounds!   Legs like hams! So fat they can’t even walk! They needed three seats in   the airplane! Step right up!” And, therefore, white flags with a red   ball, symbol of the Land of the Rising Sun, hang from the balconies on   this street of jewelers near the harbor where I’m searching for a   restaurant, to have lunch. In the end, though, it’s the American flag   that dominates. One is struck by the omnipresence of the Star-Spangled   Banner, even on the T-shirts of the kids who come to watch the sumo   wrestlers as the little crowd cheers them on.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It’s the flag of the American cavalry in westerns. It’s the flag of   Frank Capra movies. It’s the fetish that is there, in the frame, every   time the American president appears. It’s the beloved flag, almost a   living being, the use of which, I understand, is subject not just to   rules but to an extremely precise code of flag behavior: don’t get it   dirty, don’t copy it, don’t tattoo it onto your body, never let it fall   on the ground, never hang it upside down, don’t insult it, don’t burn   it. On the other hand, if it gets too old, if it can no longer be used,   if it can’t be flown, then you must burn it; yes, instead of throwing   it out or bundling it up, better to burn it than abandon it in the   trash. It’s the flag that was offended by Kid Rock at the Super Bowl,   and it’s the flag of Michael W. Smith in his song “There She Stands,”   written just after September 11, in which “she” is none other than   “it,” the flag, the American symbol that was targeted, defiled,   attacked, scorned by the barbarians, but is always proudly unfurled.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It’s a little strange, this obsession with the flag. It’s   incomprehensible for someone who, like me, comes from a country   virtually without a flag—where the flag has, so to speak, disappeared;   where you see it flying only in front of official buildings; and where   any nostalgia and concern for it, any evocation of it, is a sign of an   attachment to the past that has become almost ridiculous. Is this flag   obsession a result of September 11? A response to that trauma whose   violence we Europeans persist in underestimating but which, three years   later, haunts American minds as much as ever? Should we reread those   pages in Tocqueville on the good fortune of being sheltered by   geography from violations of the nation’s territorial space and come to   see in this return to the flag a neurotic abreaction to the   astonishment that the violation actually occurred? Or is it something   else entirely? An older, more conflicted relationship of America with   itself and with its national existence? A difficulty in being a nation,   more severe than in the flagless countries of old Europe, that produces   this compensatory effect?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Leafed through the first few pages of One Nation, After All, which the   author, the sociologist Alan Wolfe, gave me last night. Maybe the   secret lies in this “after all.” Maybe American patriotism is more   complex, more painful, than it seems at first glance, and perhaps its   apparent excessiveness comes from that. Or perhaps it has to do, as   Tocqueville saw it, rather with a kind of “reflective patriotism”   which, unlike the “instinctive love” that reigned during the regimes of   times past, is forced to exaggerate when it comes to emblems and   symbols. To be continued . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Tell Me What Your Prisons Are . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Tocqueville’s first intention was, we tend to forget, to investigate   the American penal system. He went beyond that, of course. He analyzed   the political system and American society in its entirety better than   anyone. But as his notes, his journal, his letters to Kergorlay and   others, and the very text of Democracy in America attest, it was with   this business of prisons that everything began, and that’s why I too,   after Newport, asked to see the New York prison of Rikers Island, that   city within a city on an island that is not shown on every map—a place   few New Yorkers seem to take much notice of.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A meeting with Mark J. Cranston, of the New York City Department of   Corrections, this Tuesday morning at 5:00 a.m. in Queens, at the   entrance to a bridge that doesn’t lead anywhere open to the public.   Landscape of desolate shoreline in the foggy morning light. Electric   barbed-wire fences. High walls. A checkpoint, as at the edge of a war   zone, where the prison guards, almost all of them black, greet one   another as they come on duty, and—heading in the opposite direction,   packed into barred buses that look like school buses—the prisoners,   also mainly black, or Hispanic, who are driven with chains on their   feet to courthouses in the Bronx and Queens. A security badge along   with my photo. Frisked. On the other side of the East River, in the   fog, a white boat like a ghost ship, where, for lack of space, the   least dangerous criminals are locked up. And very soon, clinging to New   York (La Guardia is so close that, at times, when the wind blows from a   certain quarter, the noise from the planes makes you raise your voice   or even stop talking), the ten prison buildings that make up this   fortress, this enclave cut off from everything, this anti-utopian   reservation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The common room, dirty gray, where the people arrested during the night   are assembled, seated on makeshift benches. A small cell, No. 14, where   two prisoners (white—is that by chance?) have been isolated. A neater   dormitory, with clean sheets, where a sign indicates, as in Manhattan   bars, that the zone is “smoke-free.” A man, weirdly agitated, who,   taking me for a health inspector, hurries toward me to complain about   the mosquitoes. And before we arrive at the detention center proper,   before the row of cells, all identical, like minuscule horse stalls, a   labyrinth of corridors sliced with bars and opening onto the series of   “social” areas they persist in showing me: a chapel; a mosque; a   volleyball court from which a distant birdsong rises; a library, where   everyone is free, they tell me, to consult law manuals; another room,   finally, where there are three open boxes of letters, marked grievance,   legal aid, and social services. At first sight you’d think it is a   dilapidated hospital, but one obsessed with hygiene: the enormous black   female guard, her belt studded with keys, who is guiding me through   this maze explains that the first thing to do when a delinquent arrives   is to have him take a shower in order to disinfect him, later on she   tells me—in the nice booming voice of a guard who has wound up, since   there’s no other choice, liking these prisoners—that the second urgent   thing is to run a battery of psychological tests to identify the   suicidal temperaments; prisoners call to her as we pass, insult her   because they’ve been denied the use of the recreation room or the   canteen, make farting noises at which she doesn’t bat an eye, stop her   sometimes to confide a wish to live or die; it’s only when you look at   them up close, obviously, that things become more complicated.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This man with shackled feet. This other one, handcuffs on his wrists   and gloves over the handcuffs, because just last week he hid eight   razor blades in his ass before throwing himself on a guard to cut his   throat. These wild-animal glares, hard to endure. These prisoners for   whom a secure system of serving hatches had to be invented, because   they took advantage of the moment when their scrap of food was slid   over to them to bite the guard’s hand. The little Hispanic man, hand on   his ear, streaming blood, screaming that he should be taken to the   infirmary, under the shouts of his black co-detainees—the guard tells   me he has a “Rikers cut,” a ritual gash made to the ear or face of an   inmate by the big shots of the Latin Kings and the Bloods, the gangs   that control the prison. The shouts, the fuck yous, the enraged banging   on the metal doors in the maximum-security section. Farther on, at the   end of the section, in one of the three “shower cells,” which open onto   the corridor, the spectacle of a bearded, naked giant jerking off in   front of an impassive female guard, to whom he shouts in the voice of a   madman, “Come and get me, bitch! Come on!” And then the cry of alarm my   guard lets out when, dying of thirst, I bend toward a sink in the   hallway: “No! Not there! Don’t drink there!” Marking my surprise, she   regains her composure. Excuses herself. Stammers out that it’s all   right, it’s just the prisoners’ sink, I could have drunk there. But her   reflex says a lot about sanitary conditions in the jail. Rikers Island   is actually a “jail,” not a “prison.” It accepts those who have been   charged and await sentencing as well as those sentenced to less than a   year. What would this be like if it were a real prison? How would these   people be treated if they were hardened criminals?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On the way back with Mark Cranston, taking the bridge that leads to the   normal world and noticing what I hadn’t noticed when I arrived—namely,   that from where I am and, most likely, from the volleyball court and   the exercise yard and even certain cells, you can see, as if you were   touching it, the Manhattan skyline—I can’t dodge this question: Does   the impression of having brushed with hell arise because Rikers is cut   off or because it is so close to everything? And then another question   occurs to me when Cranston, anxious about the impression his “house”   has made, explains that the island used to be a huge garbage dump where   the city’s trash was unloaded: Prison or dumping ground? A kind of   replacement, on the same site, of society’s trash by its rejects? First   impressions of the system. First briefing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On Religion in General, and Baseball in Particular\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Leaving the city behind. Yes, leaving New York, which I know too well.   Fast, and through a driving rain. We are on the way to Cooperstown, a   miniature village in the central part of the state that has managed at   least three times to be in the heart of high-tension zones in American   history. It was the town of James Fenimore Cooper, and thus of the   symbolic responsibility for the slaughter of the Indians. It lies in a   region that, before the Civil War, fleeing slaves and their smugglers   passed through. And last but not least, since this is the claim to fame   to which it seems most attached, it is the world capital of baseball.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I spend the night in a wooden chalet that has been transformed into a   bed-and-breakfast, with ceramic rabbits in the garden and a magazine in   the bedroom that explains how to “live comfortably at thirty,” how to   be “older than seventy and still be in love,” and “six ways to get your   daily glass of milk.” The house is run by two commanding women, mother   and daughter, who wear identical bloodred canvas aprons and look the   spitting image of Margaret Thatcher at two stages of her life. I spend   time in the morning listening to these ladies tell me the history of   their house. The building was actually created a century ago by an   officer in the Civil War, but it has been renovated so as to hide all   antique traces. “Are you interested in the bed-and-breakfast business,   which is the passion of our existence?” one of them asks. “Is this your   first experience? Did you like it? I’m glad you did, since there are as   many bed-and-breakfasts as there are owners. Everyone puts their mark   on it—it’s an art, a religion. No, that’s not the word, ‘religion.’ We   don’t make any difference here between religions—no more than we would   with the Yankees and the Red Sox. Who won, by the way?” (She has turned   toward a customer in shorts and undershirt who is sitting at the table   next to mine. He shrugs as he wolfs down a huge slab of bacon.) “See,   he doesn’t know. That means it doesn’t count. And you—what are you? Oh!   Jewish. Oh! Atheist. That’s okay . . . Everyone does what they want . .   . In this business you have to like ninety-nine percent of your clients   . . .”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The breakfast was a little long. But now I’m in the immense museum,   completely disproportionate to the dollhouses in the rest of the town,   where this great national sport is honored, this sport that establishes   people’s identities and that has truly become part of their civic and   patriotic religion, which is baseball: isn’t there, in the Hall of Fame   adjoining the museum, a plaque devoted to those champions who   interrupted their careers to serve in American wars?New York Times bestseller [quote]--The New York Times","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300179923173,"sku":"NP9780812974713","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812974713.jpg?v=1767721444","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/american-vertigo-isbn-9780812974713","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}