Letters to America: A Chance for Us to Listen

With this wildly inconsistent collection of 46 letters, each authored by a person from a different country, Gellar hopes to give readers ""an empathic experience along the path toward universal connectedness."" The letter writers range in age from 13 to 80 and can all be described as ordinary people, something that serves as the collection's most significant flaw and its greatest asset. Americans are alternately described as spiritually bereft or ""religious fanatics,"" leisurely or obsessively busy, warm and open or incapable of ""true friendship."" And while it's misguided to fault the letter writers, the maddeningly uneven writing skills on display here make the text a difficult and frustrating read. That said, the collection is at its best at its most intimate and personal moments: a Bangladeshi woman expressing awe at the American doctors who treated her newborn grandson; a Laotian man describing the explosion of an American bomb that killed or injured many of his childhood friends. Gellar chose these letters from over 600 that had been submitted to a website she began with a friend in 2001. Her intentions may be noble, but, unfortunately, the results fall far short of her lofty goals. Photos.