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The Golden Door: Letters to America
Britain's most readable journalist takes on his biggest challenge - America. Where were you when John F. Kennedy was shot? Today the answer more often than not is going to be 'not born'. You have to be some way past 45 to know where you were when Kennedy was shot in Dallas in 1963. A generation later, you could ask the same question about the World Trade Centre. Where were you when the plane hit the twin towers on 11 September 2001? But this book is about what happened between those two moments. The world's perception of America changed between those two waves. A.A. Gill's book is about the things he's always found admirable and optimistic about the United States and its citizens. Two of the happiest times of his life were spent living in New York and the mountains of Kentucky. The contrast between the two couldn't have been more complicated and different. The America he found was contradictory and elusive, not the simpletons' place he'd been led to believe. It was still a list of raw ingredients rather than the old stew of Europe. Now A.A. Gill takes another look at the America he knew in the 1970s, a place that seemed to hold promise, practical energy and a plan for the future. How did it become the political magnetic north, against which the liberal intellectuals from the rest of the world set their opinions? Why is it so easily mocked, so comprehensively blamed, so thoughtlessly hated? This book is a collection of linked essays based around places that will open up truths and mythologies about America and Americans. The theme of his journey will be searching for 'the home of'. Every other small town in America boasts on its Welcome sign that it is the home of something or a mountain, a mine, peaches, spotted pigs, a president, the world's biggest ball of string, barbecues, the deepest hole. So that's where A.A. Gill starts, going to find the home of everything.
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
About the author
A.A. Gill
28 books106 followersAdrian Anthony Gill was an English journalist. He was the author of 9 books, including The Angry Island. He was the TV and restaurant critic and a regular features writer for The Sunday Times, a columnist for Esquire, and a contributor to Vanity Fair. He lived in London.
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
February 14, 2014
Vanity Fair lured me into reading this book by printing an extract last summer. The segment was drawn from a chapter in which A.A. Gill took to task the grand Old World tradition of looking-down-our-noses-if-you-please at America and its culture and proceeded to steamroll that sentiment with humor, insight and balls the size of bungalows.
As a Brit, Gill seemed unafraid of voicing his opinion, despite the risk of backlash by some of his peers among “the educated, enlightened, expensive middle classes of Europe” at which he aimed his sharp intellect and wit. It was bold and surprising, and got my attention on a personal level. As an American who lived in England for several years, I had noted that some Brits seemed to be a bit sniffy about America, and not just regarding politics, Britain’s longer history or greater number of castles. No, some purportedly were against American anything, even though they also seemed to actually love many American things and cities. I could never find the exact way to explain this snobbery or why it was a load of tosh. Fortunately, Mr. Gill is enough of a don’t-give-a-damn-what-anyone-thinks Grumpy Gus (as evidenced by his several appearances on a show called “Grumpy Old Men”) that he clearly and humorously explained it for me.
His bit of literary derring-do roped me into purchasing the book, which turned out to be a history of America interwoven with a history of his family in America. Much of the U.S. history was interesting and familiar, scattered with bits I hadn’t known, and sometimes expressing a take on that history which seems to have, occasionally, missed the point. It also got a bit boring here and there, which led to a bit of flipping past sections on my part (though I did read the majority of it). When the end came, it was not a sad parting of reader and book. It was interesting in many places, but overall not engrossing. Which is to say, by all means I recommend it, but as something to keep on your nightstand and dip into from time to time.
As a Brit, Gill seemed unafraid of voicing his opinion, despite the risk of backlash by some of his peers among “the educated, enlightened, expensive middle classes of Europe” at which he aimed his sharp intellect and wit. It was bold and surprising, and got my attention on a personal level. As an American who lived in England for several years, I had noted that some Brits seemed to be a bit sniffy about America, and not just regarding politics, Britain’s longer history or greater number of castles. No, some purportedly were against American anything, even though they also seemed to actually love many American things and cities. I could never find the exact way to explain this snobbery or why it was a load of tosh. Fortunately, Mr. Gill is enough of a don’t-give-a-damn-what-anyone-thinks Grumpy Gus (as evidenced by his several appearances on a show called “Grumpy Old Men”) that he clearly and humorously explained it for me.
His bit of literary derring-do roped me into purchasing the book, which turned out to be a history of America interwoven with a history of his family in America. Much of the U.S. history was interesting and familiar, scattered with bits I hadn’t known, and sometimes expressing a take on that history which seems to have, occasionally, missed the point. It also got a bit boring here and there, which led to a bit of flipping past sections on my part (though I did read the majority of it). When the end came, it was not a sad parting of reader and book. It was interesting in many places, but overall not engrossing. Which is to say, by all means I recommend it, but as something to keep on your nightstand and dip into from time to time.
January 17, 2015
Compared to Gill’s previous books, which have all been collections of short journalism pieces, The Golden Door is a more cohesive book which gathers a selection of his essays on America. The pieces can still be read independently, but I got the impression it was written to order, and it’s loosely connected by Gill’s exploration of his family tree and his ancestors who moved from Yorkshire to the US in the 19th century.
Gill remains a brilliant wordsmith and stylist, capable of creating perfectly vivid scenes and moments. One of my favourite moments is in the opening essay ‘Cuttings,’ as he imagines the story behind the buffalo head which hung on his family’s wall in England for so long:
I imagine him spending years on the wall in a modest but sturdy farmhouse, inglorious and oversized, a talking point, an anchor for the paper chains and mistletoe above a sideboard in a dining room, with brown furniture smelling of beeswax and ham and vinegar and folded linen, with hunting prints on each side, a bevelled mirror on a chain, the bone-handled carving set in its blue velvet-lined box, the slow tick of the grandfather clock, the sticking drawers lined with the yellowing pages of the Yorkshire Post, neat with saved candle-ends, comic bottle openers, plated silver pickle forks, a box of England’s Best matches, a stained recipe for Guards pudding, a china anchovy paste pot containing the charmed and silver three-pences for Christmas puddings. Perhaps they gave him a name, a Yankee name from a penny dreadful Wild West story: Tex, or Doc. Perhaps an Indian name: Sitting Bull or Geronimo. More likely, with ponderous Yorkshire humour, the name of someone he reminded the family of – Uncle Alfred, Witless Wilf. And back before that, when his name was of his own bellowing, I imagine him being picked out by a man from this valley in Yorkshire, their threads converging as the man stepped out on his long journey to the West. First the dogcart to the station, then the train to Liverpool or Southampton, the ship to New York – in comfort I imagine, not a stateroom, but not steerage – then a long, slow, rocking journey out west on that astonishing marathon of civil engineering and endurance, a transcontinental railway, to get off in some lone, blown and gritty rural town beneath the mountains, picked up by his cousins, who now look quite different, taller in their slope-heeled work boots, darker, rangier, broader, chest-out-confident, with broad hats and bandannas, and I expect they suggested a trip to hunt buffalo, to spend a night out on the prairie, sleep under the stars, eat pork and beans, drink whiskey, talk about home and the new life out here in the soon-to-be-state.
Gill is one of those people clearly very much in love with the idea of America, and while he’s not blind to its faults, this book is largely hagiography. (Amusingly, its American publication title is To America With Love.) Which is fine, and very entertaining, but you can see through the cracks; for all his wit and charm and thoughtfulness, Gill still labours under his own prejudices and background and immoveable convictions. He has no tolerance for the sneering European notion that America is “stupid” or “greedy,” but this means he simply flips that sneering arrogance back on Europe (and it’s always just “Europe,” with no concession to the vastly different nations and cultures therein). His piece on New York makes sweeping generalisations about New Yorkers, and implicitly reveals that the only New Yorkers Gill spends time around are the well-heeled ones at dinner parties and expensive restaurants.
But he also makes interesting points which aren’t usually made, or which I at least don’t usually hear. He examines the duality of the immigrant’s story: how viewed from America, it’s a story of hope and opportunity and new beginnings, whereas from Europe’s viewpoint, it’s a story of “farewell, failure, sadness and defeat,” spurred by catastrophes such as the potato famine or the Highland clearances, and how “mostly, the people who left were the ones who could be spared least…the young and the strong, the adventurous, the clever and the skilled.” This feeds into an argument against the disapproval of America as a greedy and consumptive nation, as Gill considers what such an “empty” land must have seemed like for immigrants fleeing famine, overcrowding and poverty; how a blessed cornucopia would have woven itself into the national character. He defends the US on its violent murder rate, pointing out that statistically, per capita, it only slides into the top ten – outpaced by places like Colombia, Paraguay and Bolivia. He notes that eight of the top ten lists are Spanish-speaking, “the language of inarticulate anger,” all are “notably religious,” and all of them are ex-colonies. The real reason, which he’s saved up for later, is that they’re all countries “with serious drug distribution networks.” This is the sort of writer Gill is (and I don’t say this as a criticism): somebody who deals not with facts or statistics, but with freewheeling speculation and imaginative rumination. A writer who looks at the big picture, and understands the value of narrative, of the stories that nations and people tell themselves.
Which means, as in some of the instances I highlighted above, he can sometimes be frustrating even when I know better than to be frustrated. While he concedes in his conclusion that there’s no longer any great difference between Europe and America, that we now all live in a post-modern global society, he also concludes that:
It was, in the ten thousands years of our civilisation, the last experiment in creating a brand-new nation. Idealist, reasonable, ordered, from scratch. And that will never happen again. There are no more empty lots in this world to grow countries in. There will never, ever, be another America.
Sigh. I know you need to come up with something snappy when wrapping up your Big Book About The Idea of America, but Gill knows full well that Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and most of the nations in Latin America are younger than the US – and that’s if we’re only counting New World “empty lot” (!) nations, and I don’t see why we should, since they had just as many original inhabitants as modern nations like South Africa and Singapore, which also scratches off any defence that America was a properly “different” nation from those of Old Europe, unlike the apron-stringed children of the Commonwealth. I know they get crowded out in the noise, but all these little countries around the world have all their own stories and mythologies. The frame of the world can’t simply be reduced to America and Europe.
But then, I don’t read A.A. Gill for a balanced viewpoint. I read him because he’s caustically funny, wonderfully inventive and one of the most talented, interesting, readable journalists around. The Golden Door is not a book to read for any kind of reasonable or objective discussion about America, but it’s a cracking good book about Gill’s own impressions and experiences there.
Gill remains a brilliant wordsmith and stylist, capable of creating perfectly vivid scenes and moments. One of my favourite moments is in the opening essay ‘Cuttings,’ as he imagines the story behind the buffalo head which hung on his family’s wall in England for so long:
I imagine him spending years on the wall in a modest but sturdy farmhouse, inglorious and oversized, a talking point, an anchor for the paper chains and mistletoe above a sideboard in a dining room, with brown furniture smelling of beeswax and ham and vinegar and folded linen, with hunting prints on each side, a bevelled mirror on a chain, the bone-handled carving set in its blue velvet-lined box, the slow tick of the grandfather clock, the sticking drawers lined with the yellowing pages of the Yorkshire Post, neat with saved candle-ends, comic bottle openers, plated silver pickle forks, a box of England’s Best matches, a stained recipe for Guards pudding, a china anchovy paste pot containing the charmed and silver three-pences for Christmas puddings. Perhaps they gave him a name, a Yankee name from a penny dreadful Wild West story: Tex, or Doc. Perhaps an Indian name: Sitting Bull or Geronimo. More likely, with ponderous Yorkshire humour, the name of someone he reminded the family of – Uncle Alfred, Witless Wilf. And back before that, when his name was of his own bellowing, I imagine him being picked out by a man from this valley in Yorkshire, their threads converging as the man stepped out on his long journey to the West. First the dogcart to the station, then the train to Liverpool or Southampton, the ship to New York – in comfort I imagine, not a stateroom, but not steerage – then a long, slow, rocking journey out west on that astonishing marathon of civil engineering and endurance, a transcontinental railway, to get off in some lone, blown and gritty rural town beneath the mountains, picked up by his cousins, who now look quite different, taller in their slope-heeled work boots, darker, rangier, broader, chest-out-confident, with broad hats and bandannas, and I expect they suggested a trip to hunt buffalo, to spend a night out on the prairie, sleep under the stars, eat pork and beans, drink whiskey, talk about home and the new life out here in the soon-to-be-state.
Gill is one of those people clearly very much in love with the idea of America, and while he’s not blind to its faults, this book is largely hagiography. (Amusingly, its American publication title is To America With Love.) Which is fine, and very entertaining, but you can see through the cracks; for all his wit and charm and thoughtfulness, Gill still labours under his own prejudices and background and immoveable convictions. He has no tolerance for the sneering European notion that America is “stupid” or “greedy,” but this means he simply flips that sneering arrogance back on Europe (and it’s always just “Europe,” with no concession to the vastly different nations and cultures therein). His piece on New York makes sweeping generalisations about New Yorkers, and implicitly reveals that the only New Yorkers Gill spends time around are the well-heeled ones at dinner parties and expensive restaurants.
But he also makes interesting points which aren’t usually made, or which I at least don’t usually hear. He examines the duality of the immigrant’s story: how viewed from America, it’s a story of hope and opportunity and new beginnings, whereas from Europe’s viewpoint, it’s a story of “farewell, failure, sadness and defeat,” spurred by catastrophes such as the potato famine or the Highland clearances, and how “mostly, the people who left were the ones who could be spared least…the young and the strong, the adventurous, the clever and the skilled.” This feeds into an argument against the disapproval of America as a greedy and consumptive nation, as Gill considers what such an “empty” land must have seemed like for immigrants fleeing famine, overcrowding and poverty; how a blessed cornucopia would have woven itself into the national character. He defends the US on its violent murder rate, pointing out that statistically, per capita, it only slides into the top ten – outpaced by places like Colombia, Paraguay and Bolivia. He notes that eight of the top ten lists are Spanish-speaking, “the language of inarticulate anger,” all are “notably religious,” and all of them are ex-colonies. The real reason, which he’s saved up for later, is that they’re all countries “with serious drug distribution networks.” This is the sort of writer Gill is (and I don’t say this as a criticism): somebody who deals not with facts or statistics, but with freewheeling speculation and imaginative rumination. A writer who looks at the big picture, and understands the value of narrative, of the stories that nations and people tell themselves.
Which means, as in some of the instances I highlighted above, he can sometimes be frustrating even when I know better than to be frustrated. While he concedes in his conclusion that there’s no longer any great difference between Europe and America, that we now all live in a post-modern global society, he also concludes that:
It was, in the ten thousands years of our civilisation, the last experiment in creating a brand-new nation. Idealist, reasonable, ordered, from scratch. And that will never happen again. There are no more empty lots in this world to grow countries in. There will never, ever, be another America.
Sigh. I know you need to come up with something snappy when wrapping up your Big Book About The Idea of America, but Gill knows full well that Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and most of the nations in Latin America are younger than the US – and that’s if we’re only counting New World “empty lot” (!) nations, and I don’t see why we should, since they had just as many original inhabitants as modern nations like South Africa and Singapore, which also scratches off any defence that America was a properly “different” nation from those of Old Europe, unlike the apron-stringed children of the Commonwealth. I know they get crowded out in the noise, but all these little countries around the world have all their own stories and mythologies. The frame of the world can’t simply be reduced to America and Europe.
But then, I don’t read A.A. Gill for a balanced viewpoint. I read him because he’s caustically funny, wonderfully inventive and one of the most talented, interesting, readable journalists around. The Golden Door is not a book to read for any kind of reasonable or objective discussion about America, but it’s a cracking good book about Gill’s own impressions and experiences there.
July 8, 2013
I really wanted to like A.A. Gill's To America with Love (Simon & Schuster, 2013, $25.00, 256 pages, originally published in Great Britain in 2012), but little things kept intruding on my consciousness to lead me first to question its accuracy and then to actually distrust not only the facts but the point of view underlying it. That's a shame, because there's much to the book that deserves admiration or that succeeds in simultaneously entertaining and enlightening. Gill, described as a provocateur, is that indeed. He was born in Edinburgh, but has lived in London for most of his life. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. The book seeks to explain America to the British (and by extension to other Europeans) with typical arch British humor and a deeply ironic and satirical voice. His profile in Wikipedia describes him as being dyslexic, hiring readers to read text to him and copy editors to transcribe his badly mis-spelled output. This may mean that while his writing is sometimes inaccurate, so is his listening. If his goal is to provoke, he succeeds in spades. If he also wishes to shed real light on the American character and scene, he needs to do some more thinking and work. Still, this is a sometimes informative and often amusing book worth reading, particularly if one reads from a perspective of sufficient knowledge of America to keep it in context and recognize it for what it actually is. The remainder of my review can be found on my blog. If you decide to purchase this volume, please consider ordering it through the Amazon portal there.
December 30, 2016
I discovered AA Gill's brilliance about 2 weeks before he made it public that he had cancer, and about a month before he died. The day he died, I bought this book; I'll be buying more.
There are people who can write, and people who can write. Needless to say, I think Gill is one of the latter. Take this, which I sent a photo of to a friend who's moving to the US for a few months for an internship:
On some unremarked day in the nineteenth century, Europe passed, without noticing, a tipping point. It felt, through a collective pheromone, a synchronicity of loss of nerve. A faint breeze of ennui that now it had more to lose than to gain. The journey had been all uphill, now they stood on the crest and looked at the gentle slope down. Europe is a place that conserves. It maintains, it curates its civilisation, protects it against the ravages and rust of other cultures, and the rot of time and intellectual theft. We are a continent where fear of losing what we have is greater than the ambition to make it anew. No one will ever rebuild Paris again, no new Renaissance will come to reinvent Rome. No heoric age will tear up the centre of London to put an idol on a column surrounded by lions.
Like the very best writers and critics, Gill marries acute powers of observation with brilliant and genuinely funny expression. Add to this that he was an alcoholic ex-drug dealer with balls of steel, and I've added to my small cannon of journalistic heroes. It's just a shame that, like Orwell, Hitchens, Thompson and Adair, I discovered him when his too-brief time was already over.
There are people who can write, and people who can write. Needless to say, I think Gill is one of the latter. Take this, which I sent a photo of to a friend who's moving to the US for a few months for an internship:
On some unremarked day in the nineteenth century, Europe passed, without noticing, a tipping point. It felt, through a collective pheromone, a synchronicity of loss of nerve. A faint breeze of ennui that now it had more to lose than to gain. The journey had been all uphill, now they stood on the crest and looked at the gentle slope down. Europe is a place that conserves. It maintains, it curates its civilisation, protects it against the ravages and rust of other cultures, and the rot of time and intellectual theft. We are a continent where fear of losing what we have is greater than the ambition to make it anew. No one will ever rebuild Paris again, no new Renaissance will come to reinvent Rome. No heoric age will tear up the centre of London to put an idol on a column surrounded by lions.
Like the very best writers and critics, Gill marries acute powers of observation with brilliant and genuinely funny expression. Add to this that he was an alcoholic ex-drug dealer with balls of steel, and I've added to my small cannon of journalistic heroes. It's just a shame that, like Orwell, Hitchens, Thompson and Adair, I discovered him when his too-brief time was already over.
April 27, 2019
I found this never-read book in my bookcase. I don't know how it got there and why I'd never read it. Now I wish I'd read it when it was published in 2011 - not 2019 - because it then must have seemed terribly clever and insightful. Now it seems simply sad and nostalgic; the America it describes has already faded into history. So it's still clevery written. Still insightful. But just utterly out of date. Perhaps the most insightful words now come in the penultimate pargraph of the ultimate essay when Gill writes: "...and the next centuury will, I guess, belong to the new immigrants of Asia and Latin America. They will have different dreams and new imperatives, and the checks will have to adjust their balance." As a non-American observing American society and politics f rom a distance, as reported by Americans and American news media, it looks as if those adjustments are being forced on the country now. Sadly, the America critiqued in this clever and insightful book is no more. It's a good read but only if you're intrested in recent American history.
September 3, 2024
I'm not sure why I finished this. There were a few interesting nuggets, but it was not nearly as good as the Bill Bryson books I was hoping it would emulate. Mostly it felt like Britsplaning. There was a lot of opinion, theory, and rumor present as fact. The things he chose to write about (guns, New York) may not be as representative of the United States as Europeans think they are.
And sometimes he just gets it wrong:
"I once went through a town on the flat plain of Ohio, it was called Xeniya. It had been hit by a hurricane. I've looked it up, it must have been 1974." How can he look up the 1974 Xenia tornado and get both the town name and the storm type wrong? Or go on for a while about American attempts to teach chimpanzees sign language in a chapter about evoltion without mentioning Koko the gorilla, the most successful attempt to teach an ape sign language?
There are a few interesting bits that prompted me to read their relevant wikipedia pages and learn something about US history, but not enough of them.
And sometimes he just gets it wrong:
"I once went through a town on the flat plain of Ohio, it was called Xeniya. It had been hit by a hurricane. I've looked it up, it must have been 1974." How can he look up the 1974 Xenia tornado and get both the town name and the storm type wrong? Or go on for a while about American attempts to teach chimpanzees sign language in a chapter about evoltion without mentioning Koko the gorilla, the most successful attempt to teach an ape sign language?
There are a few interesting bits that prompted me to read their relevant wikipedia pages and learn something about US history, but not enough of them.
September 3, 2018
Wasn't what I expected...thought he would be sneering down his British (Scots) nose at us colonials. This was not the case, although I expect he would have if he didn't have American cousins to visit. He's a pretty snarky guy - read some of his other stuff.
Anyway, RIP, Mr. Gill.
Anyway, RIP, Mr. Gill.
April 17, 2021
AA Gill is simply the best
Read
August 24, 2023really good! I've liked everything AA Gill has written!
May 3, 2024
Gilt edged Gill
A brilliant, thoughtful portrait of America as a place, a people and above all an idea. Full of wit and insight.
A brilliant, thoughtful portrait of America as a place, a people and above all an idea. Full of wit and insight.
June 20, 2026
I know just enough about just enough of the historical references to find the entire book dubious at best.
October 30, 2012
A.A. Gill is a British journalist known not only for the quality of his writing, but also for his caustic prejudices against certain sections of humanity, e.g. the Welsh, the Isle of Man.
This book consists of eighteen interconnected essays on America. Gill has family in America (American cousins) and has lived and worked there. He is obviously a big fan of the US, but also aware of the condescending attitude that Europeans & the British hold towards Americans and America.
In these extremely well-written and entertaining essays, Gill offers an explanation for the character of the US and why the American traits viewed negatively by Europe are viewed positively by Americans. In the essay 'Stupid', Gill contrasts the widely held contemptuous European view that Americans are stupid and lacking in intellect with the achievements of the founding fathers who took the ideas from classical Europe and applied them in a practical way to the new nation, while Europeans simply read about them.
He also offers an alternative perception of American behaviour and challenges European prejudices. In the essay 'Harvest' he suggests that the expansion of the settlers across the continent, turning wilderness into farmland, was not due to greed, but was a natural reaction of people fleeing famine and poverty who had the chance to gain a foothold in a place where there was enough land to feed everyone.
Don't be fooled however into thinking that Gill's open-mindedness and liberality towards Americans have changed him. His prejudices against other groups are still there, and if you are Irish, Swiss, Welsh, or a dentist be prepared for a swipe of his caustic pen.
The most revealing essay for me was the on the hillbillies of Kentucky, called 'Moonshine'. Not so much for what it revealed about these citizens (pretty much confirmed every prejudice I've ever held), but for what it revealed about A.A. Gill. Gill spent some time living in Deliverance country and he enjoyed it - the violence, the alcoholism, the poverty and unwillingness to move out of poverty, and the narrow-minded insecure personalities. Most of these communities were descended from Jacobite Scots and seem to have entrenched all the worst Scottish clan traits. They are stubborn to the point of stupidity - too stubborn to give up living a life of incredible hardship and move elsewhere. These are some of the poorest communities in modern America, but they don't need to keep living the way they do. Gill, who was born in Edinburgh seemed to feel right at home here, and actually admired these people.
This was a very good read - thought provoking, entertaining and interesting. A.A. Gill might be a hard bastard but he can write.
This book consists of eighteen interconnected essays on America. Gill has family in America (American cousins) and has lived and worked there. He is obviously a big fan of the US, but also aware of the condescending attitude that Europeans & the British hold towards Americans and America.
In these extremely well-written and entertaining essays, Gill offers an explanation for the character of the US and why the American traits viewed negatively by Europe are viewed positively by Americans. In the essay 'Stupid', Gill contrasts the widely held contemptuous European view that Americans are stupid and lacking in intellect with the achievements of the founding fathers who took the ideas from classical Europe and applied them in a practical way to the new nation, while Europeans simply read about them.
He also offers an alternative perception of American behaviour and challenges European prejudices. In the essay 'Harvest' he suggests that the expansion of the settlers across the continent, turning wilderness into farmland, was not due to greed, but was a natural reaction of people fleeing famine and poverty who had the chance to gain a foothold in a place where there was enough land to feed everyone.
Don't be fooled however into thinking that Gill's open-mindedness and liberality towards Americans have changed him. His prejudices against other groups are still there, and if you are Irish, Swiss, Welsh, or a dentist be prepared for a swipe of his caustic pen.
The most revealing essay for me was the on the hillbillies of Kentucky, called 'Moonshine'. Not so much for what it revealed about these citizens (pretty much confirmed every prejudice I've ever held), but for what it revealed about A.A. Gill. Gill spent some time living in Deliverance country and he enjoyed it - the violence, the alcoholism, the poverty and unwillingness to move out of poverty, and the narrow-minded insecure personalities. Most of these communities were descended from Jacobite Scots and seem to have entrenched all the worst Scottish clan traits. They are stubborn to the point of stupidity - too stubborn to give up living a life of incredible hardship and move elsewhere. These are some of the poorest communities in modern America, but they don't need to keep living the way they do. Gill, who was born in Edinburgh seemed to feel right at home here, and actually admired these people.
This was a very good read - thought provoking, entertaining and interesting. A.A. Gill might be a hard bastard but he can write.
November 4, 2012
I have a problem with AA Gill, and I suspect it's one shared by many others: call me old-fashioned, but I need to like the author and like spending time in their company. Gill may be brilliant and articulate and witty but none of this adds up to any kind of sum of its parts, and he's something of a bore. I must however emphasise that there is some fascinating popular history in this book, and Gill's insights are often worth the time spent reading them. It's just that, for a humorist, he's not funny, and his writing is strident and devoid of charm. He's like one of those English people that are always joking around, and you wonder if they're capable of being serious for a minute, then they do turn serious and you realise why they are always joking around.
July 24, 2013
Having liked Gill's previous books, I decided to give this one a try. Strong at the outset, where he makes the case that America is "envied" by others for its uniqueness, and not bad throughout the rest of the book (exception: skip the sex chapter!). However, I found his final conclusion a bit difficult to accept without any further discussion; he just sort of makes an assertion and the book ends. Recommended for those interested in a Brit's look at the States.
I confess a personal interest in that a chapter is devoted to his friend, writer Alistair Cooke - my dad made a brief appearance (not-quite-15-minutes of fame) in the documentary series "Alistair Cooke's America" years ago.
I confess a personal interest in that a chapter is devoted to his friend, writer Alistair Cooke - my dad made a brief appearance (not-quite-15-minutes of fame) in the documentary series "Alistair Cooke's America" years ago.
January 27, 2013
Not everyone one will like this hagiography of the United States. A A Gill is an entertaining writer on food and restaurants/ This is different because he find things admirable about so much of America. These 18 connected essays offers a light-hearted insight into history, the migrant experience (he has had relatives here) and the culture of the US today (the chapter on guns, for example). His love and knowledge of the place is balm to the ex-patriate who puts up with so much of what is wrong when surveying the media's portrayal.
July 24, 2012
I have nearly finished reading this witty and erudite book by A. A. Gill who is better known as the TV and restaurant critic for the Sunday Times.
He obviously has a great affection for his American forebears and gives a well researched view of America, her beginnings, her flaws and her strengths.
It is also satisfying to find occasional glimpses of his ascerbic wit creeping into this well written book.
He obviously has a great affection for his American forebears and gives a well researched view of America, her beginnings, her flaws and her strengths.
It is also satisfying to find occasional glimpses of his ascerbic wit creeping into this well written book.
October 2, 2013
It wouldn't be fair to compare AA Gill to Bill Bryson but it is interesting to contrast the writing style of An Englishman in the US and an American in England.
And perhaps I have been spoilt by Bill but AA Gill comes across as very dry and rigid in his prose with very little folksy humour.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that but perhaps it doesn't come off the pages as well as Bill's and it feels like history lessons at times. Which I dread.
And perhaps I have been spoilt by Bill but AA Gill comes across as very dry and rigid in his prose with very little folksy humour.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that but perhaps it doesn't come off the pages as well as Bill's and it feels like history lessons at times. Which I dread.
July 28, 2013
This is one of the funniest and most intelligently written books I've read in a long time. The British author makes historical connections to show the goodness of America and remind us of our good fortune to be here in this great country.
September 3, 2014
Funny how, sometimes, there are authors - as with musicians or filmmakers or anything in/of that nature - that you love. And then one day, almost all of a sudden you just don't. You no longer do. That's what happened here for me. Reading this. You're off the list A.A. Gill.
December 28, 2016
This British author's observational skills, writing style and sense of humor are outstanding, in spite of the fact he believes that a hurricane - not a Midwestern tornado - blew a small Ohio town off the map. RIP to a brilliant writer.
December 20, 2012
My least favourite from a favourite writer!
October 1, 2013
Entertaining
December 10, 2014
Excellent prose.
December 30, 2016
R.I.P. A. A. Gill
April 12, 2017
One of the many things I enjoy about A.A. Gill is that you don't always have to agree with everything he says, but he always has plenty to say and he always has something incredibly interesting to say and you are always learning from him. This is a learned, well researched book that throws up countless titbits, information and facts that will have you looking at The States in a different way. The chapter on Germans was particularly enlightening and thought provoking.
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