How can America be so powerful and yet so naiignorant of foreign lands, peoples and languagcertain it knows what's best for everyone? How can its individual citizens be open and generous but its foreignpolicy so domineering? And why is it shocked when theobjects of its policies grumble, protest or even strikeback?

How can America be so powerful and yet so naiignorant of foreign lands, peoples and languagcertain it knows what's best for everyone? How can its individual citizens be open and generous but its foreignpolicy so domineering? And why is it shocked when theobjects of its policies grumble, protest or even strikeback?

Hertsgaard explores why America leaves observers athome and abroad both admiring yet uneasy, envious andappalled, enchanted but bewildered. And what choices andchallenges face us in a world that becomes moreAmericanized every day?

 Acknowledgements

1 The Parochial Superpower

2 Glamorous and Gluttonous

3 Taking Freedom for Granted

4 The Oblivious Empire

5 A Palace Court Press

6 America's Gods, Holy and Unholy

7 The Land of Opportunity Turns Selfish

8 The Tragedy of American Democracy

9 Look Out, World, Here We Come to America the Beautiful

Epilogue: Why Americans See the War, and World, Differently

Notes

Index