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To America With Love 
by A.A. Gill
Simon & Schuster
Michiko Kakutani 
In his new book critic A.A. Gill tries to make up for his fellow Britons' grouchiness, sending the United States a frilly, funny valentine.
He professes his affection for America as the place that invented teenagers and reinvented sex, a New World promising fresh starts and second chances. He celebrates it as a country of big visions, noisy ambitions and brash art - a country whose very landscape is one of "superlatives and extremes".
America, he says, provokes in visitors a sense of "the sublime", the sort of wonder and fear not experienced through the polite "double glazing" of windows or the proscenium arch of a television set, but felt, almost physically, as the embodiment of "the heartbeat, the life force" of this vast and still untamed continent.
 
Many of Gill's observations, perhaps unavoidably, retrace ground covered more than a century and a half ago by Alexis de Tocqueville. He also does little to shed new light on such perennial topics as the contradictions in the American soul, torn between materialism and idealism, hedonism and puritanism, individuality and conformity. Nor does he grapple with the political partisanship that is now dividing the country, or with growing concerns about America's decline on the world stage.
There's an interesting chapter about the similarities between US and German sensibilities ("a certain unbending righteousness and an unflinching belief in freedom of speech" but "also a fear of nonconformity"), but nothing noteworthy about the influence of Hispanic culture on the US.
Perhaps the most provocative thing in To America With Love is Gill's European take on America's history of immigration. The US over the years has been a magnet, drawing "the young and the strong from Europe; the adventurous, the clever, and the skilled", he writes.
"Immigration is the story of hope and achievement, of youth, of freedom, of creation," he writes. "But all entrances on one stage are exits elsewhere. In Europe it is loss. Every one a farewell, a failure, a sadness, a defeat."
As Gill sees it, much of the bitterness that animates transatlantic relationships can be traced back to this dynamic. "The belittling, the discounting, the mocking of the States is not about them at all," he writes. "It's about us, back here in the ancient, classical, civilised continent."
The New York Times


Book review: To America With Love, by A.A. Gill

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In his new book critic A.A. Gill tries to make up for his fellow Britons' grouchiness, sending the United States a frilly, funny valentine.


Book review: To America With Love, by A.A. Gill

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}In his new book critic A.A. Gill tries to make up for his fellow Britons' grouchiness, sending the United States a frilly, funny valentine.

In his new book critic A.A. Gill tries to make up for his fellow Britons' grouchiness, sending the United States a frilly, funny valentine.