A Furious Hunger: America in the 21st Century

In a thoughtful inquiry into the American character and the role the U.S. may play in the next century, Grant (Indonesia, etc.), a professor at Monash University in Australia who has traveled extensively in the U.S., combines a Tocquevillian detachment with first-hand familiarity with the American scene. Americans, he asserts, are a contradictory people: rampant individualists, we are nevertheless community minded; hard drinkers, fast food eaters and drug takers, we profess our spirituality and devotion to God but also pursue insatiable consumer lusts; avowedly isolationist, we support countless interventions in the affairs of other countries. The view from Down Under, as Grant reports, is that too many of us buy into ""American exceptionalism,"" the belief that the U.S. is a singular, implicitly superior nation--a view that encourages America's political leaders to cloak their pursuit of national self-interest in lofty moral rhetoric. Grant writes with considerable aplomb and historical breadth. An admirer of John Kennedy, he maintains that America's reforming conscience has been stilled ever since the turmoil following the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK, which made Americans deeply conservative. Grant believes that post-Cold War America could become a humane superpower, but only if it recognizes that problems like poverty, environmental degradation, population growth, debt relief, genocide and nuclear weapons proliferation require international cooperation rather than a unilateral approach. All of Grant's insights and arguments are defensible and reasonable; by the same token, none are new or surprising enough to tell American readers anything they haven't previously heard about themselves. (July)