****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
As I just wrote-reading this book will involve you in, perhaps, more than you at first anticipated. I was not familiar with the author's previous works and, although realising that French writers are several cuts above Anglo writers, not so much in the complexity of their thoughts but definitely in the complexity of their writing, I nonetheless, open-eyed, began a book I thought would be a purview of contemporary America. I was correct-intially, but then I got to his last section, Reflections, and therein I confronted the beast. As long as Levy confined himself in those first seven chapters to a clourful, intriguing and ultimately insightful overview of American contemporary society, I embraced everything he wrote about: the Fundamentalist Christians with their mega-churches, prisons of various age and condition throughout the country, irrasible Native Americans, the Castro district of San Francisco and many and various other oddities of a too rich country-a country that can afford the silliness of an over ripe "culture" like spoiled children affording an over packed toy box.There can be no denying the beauty and richness of Levy's writing; Oh, that writing of this brilliance could become more commonplace in Anglo societies that then would not need to resort to reading a few translated French crumbs dropped to the English reader. I found myself re-reading and marking particularly beautiful passages such as this from page 55, "Who are the Amish, then? Who are these men and women who live in an economic autarky, their gaze fixed on eternity?" And this is but a small piece of a thousand piece puzzle; a puzzle that deserves to be returned to a thousand times to wallow and submerse oneself in the beauty of this wonderous prose.My prose praise is not to hide the facts of Levi's encompassing conservatism. I was lulled into overlooking as word-smith play the insignificant references to political conserservatism throughout the first section of his book. But the Reflections section near the end of American Vertigo became suffocatingly moribund-as all conservative writing ultimately is. Unfortunately I lived too long [about 26 years] in the States and I know its ubderbelly too well to absorb unflinchingly Levy's unquestioning view of the American outlook onto the world, its own suffering people and the havoc it has ridden on the world's, yes world's, environment. Although Levy is a consumate student of Plato, Hegel and many other early modern and modern thinkers, he seems not to have paid enough attention to contemporary writers such as, Heinberg, Ruppert, Marrs, Tarpley, Horowitz and many others who understand the dimension's of America's and therefore the world's problems. I don't think the truth lies in the encompassing paradigms of thinkers not alive while the twentieth and twentity first centurie's consume what is left of this sorry planet.Levy's book is a fabulous read and I would recommend it to anyone who has the time to appreciate 200 plus word sentences randomly placed throughout this brilliant book but forgetting, if you can, his deep conservatism encountered at the end.
