Stranger in a Strange Land: Encounters in the Disunited States

By Gary Younge

Book Overview

Black, opinionated, and with a distinctly working-class London accent, Gary Younge is not your typical foreign correspondent. Yet, in three years as The Guardian newspaper's New York correspondent, Younge has acquired a transatlantic reputation as one of the most thoughtful commentators on contemporary America. Combining insight and panache, he has precisely captured the intricacies of a nation perplexed at its growing isolation from the rest of the world and often bitterly divided against itself. In these pages we listen in on expansive discussions with, among others, Warren Beatty, Michael Moore, Louis Farrakhan, Susan Sontag, and Maya Angelou. We take the stage with an extravagantly attired drag queen in John Ashcroft's hometown, join the dinner table of a fundamentalist Republican who has just lost his son in the Iraq war, and ride a bus with a group of Guatemalan strawberry pickers on a latter-day Freedom Ride to Washington, D.C. Throughout we are in the company of a guide whose restless curiosity is framed with sharp political intelligence.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1595580689
• ISBN13: 9781595580689
• Release Date: May 2006
• Publisher: New Press
• Length: 301 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.7" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

The best British columnist on the US, and funny

Younge is one of the finest columnists writing in English today (in the British _Guardian_, the most trusted news source in the UK, over the BBC), and one of the best analysts of the US. His take, as a "black Briton," has enough distance to get all the historical, social, economic connections that we Americans usually miss, and enough compassion for the underdog to be compelling and persuasive. The comparisons with his native UK are fascinating, unexpected, and often very funny. My favorite bit is his description of preparing for his first US visit. The much-trashed American book "The Bell Curve" had estimated that blacks were 15 IQ points lower than others, but then friends had told him that Americans mentally add 20 IQ points to anyone who speaks with a British accent. So he'd still come out 5 points ahead in their perceptions.

I grok it

Well written, apposite, cogent. And face it, there are 300 million Americans- it's not surprising some of them are very very strange. And that's even outside the Beltway!