cover image Going Too Far Enough: American Culture at Century's End

Going Too Far Enough: American Culture at Century's End

Henry Southworth Allen. Smithsonian Books, $24.95 (224pp) ISBN 978-1-56098-367-5

``What a strange country this is-stranger than China, stranger than Atlantis, probably,'' muses Washington Post cultural critic Allen at the beginning of this collection of his columns. He trenchantly analyzes American traditions, icons and fixations ranging from state fairs to Dennis Hopper to Batman to Miss America to guns and ``good wars.'' What emerges is a sense of both the contradictions and the quirks of the national psyche-``this being a country where people will drive 3000 miles past 10,000 American small towns so they can tour the small-town Main Street at Disneyland''-and the diversity and complexity of our culture. The book is weighty at times, and Allen repeats some of his more interesting insights often enough to make the essays predictable. But his objective is impartial analysis rather than opinion, and the collection is free of the proselytizing commentary that dominates so much contemporary cultural criticism. (Oct.)