Stranger in a Strange Land

Gary Younge took up his post as the Guardian's New York correspondent in January 2003. Since then, as this collection of his journalism shows, the USA has struggled to come to terms with some deeply serious, morally questionable and divisive issues: the continuing war against terror, the invasion of Iraq, the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, the contentious re-election of George W Bush and the festering sore of racism.

Younge is skilful at conveying his evident enthusiasm for his subject, and although his sentences build into pieces which virtually hum with conviction, he is never reduced to tub-thumping to make his case.

Of course, Younge’s views about what is happening in America are embedded in a liberal tradition – would you expect anything else from a Guardian journalist? – but what makes his appointment to the New York desk so interesting is that to many of the ‘ordinary’ Americans he speaks to, he is an anomaly: as an American journalist told him, ‘Well, when they hear an English accent Americans usually add about twenty points to your IQ. But when they see a black face they usually don’t.’ This apparent contradiction allows him to ask questions and challenge orthodoxies from a different point of view.

If I make Younge’s writing sound dry, then I am doing it – and him – a grave disservice. He is an accomplished journalist with a gift for creating appealing generalisations. Check out these: ‘Integration had won African Americans the opportunity to eat in any restaurant. Only equality could ensure that they would be able to pay the bill’; and ‘The problem with George Bush is not that he is a vicious right-wing ideologue – the man can barely tie his own shoelaces – it is that he is the paid representative of corporate America.’

There is a Michael Moore -like feel to writing like this (in fact, Younge’s interview with Moore is one of the best pieces in the book), but what overwhelmingly characterises Younge’s work is a sense of wanting to get to the bottom of things. His longer pieces in particular reflect the thoughtfulness that underlies them: in the section on race he interviews Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan, and writes about the legacy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. His article about Rosa Parks’ famous 1955 sit-in on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, highlights the lesser-known case of 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, who had been thrown off a bus in similar circumstances nine months before, but who ‘never made it into the civil rights hall of fame.’

What emerges from this collection is that the USA is a far more complex entity than many Europeans like to think it is, and that its citizens are still grappling with issues that have plagued the nation since its creation. In some senses the land of liberty has never seemed so ill at ease with itself, but the star-spangled banners which fly from houses, churches and businesses right across this vast country prove that Americans from both sides of the political divide believe deeply in their country. Can the same be said of Britons?

Reviewed by James Smith, Booktrust website editor