Product Description

Debunking the myth of the "Americanization" of Europe, a noted historian presents an authoritative and engrossing cultural history of how America tried to remake Europe in its own image, and how the Europeans successfully retained their identity in the face of American mass culture. Pells provides a new paradigm for understanding the survival of local and national cultures in a global setting. Index.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #702258 in Books
• Published on: 1998-03-21
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.43 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

From Amazon.com
"The Europeans could never understand the American fixation with showers and toilets. Or how these could become a test of whose civilization was superior." Could it possibly be true, Richard Pells continues, "that sitting on the pot might be more exhilarating, and more ennobling, than trudging through Chartres or Notre Dame?"

Not the whole of Pell's cogent investigation of America's attempt to "Americanize" Europe is so merry. But it consistently displays his vast knowledge acquired both as a historian and a frequent resident abroad. Pells comes at his theme from a variety of angles: a chronological treatment before 1945 that sweeps through the cold war years; a chilling discussion of Hitler's impact on the shifting balance of cultural power between Europe and the U.S.; a look at Europe's resistance in the '90s to mass culture; and Hollywood's impact on the European film industry.

What is happening to "us," as we morph into a global culture, whose landmarks, alas, pock the globe with golden arches, Disney detritus, and NikeTowns? Pells notes, refreshingly, that "for many Americans, the effects of American's mass culture and its global economy are even more unsettling within the United States."

Highly engaging and employing a conversational tone, Not Like Us weaves history, theory, vibrant examples, and the comments of such expatriate writers as Mary McCarthy and James Baldwin. It will engage any reader seeking some kind of reason for the relentless vulgarization of the globe. --Hollis Giammatteo

From Library Journal
Pells (The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age, Univ. Pr. of New England, 1989) explores here the cultural relationship between the United States and Europe since World War II. We see Europe at first viewing the United States as an isolationist cultural backwater, then as a superpower that liberated and rebuilt the Continent, and, finally, as a dominant economic and cultural influence experienced through a flood of American films, television and print media, consumer goods, and tourists since the end of the war. Pells convincingly argues that even with this onslaught, Europe has successfully retained its collection of distinct cultures. The author even highlights areas where Europe has influenced the United States, most notably regarding performance automobiles and entertainment. Pells's book has particular value as the United States struggles to find a place on the Continent in light of the European unification movement. Recommended for academic libraries.?Robert J. Favini, Bentley Coll. Lib., Waltham, Mass.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Before 1945, Europeans ignored American culture as barbarically provincial. After 1945, they hated it as barbarically commercial. But they couldn't ignore it. Yet Pells claims that for all the McDonald's franchises and Dallas reruns seen in Europe, Europeans have not been "Americanized." Pells assembles his stories topically, addressing the influence of TV, fashion, the USIA, U.S.-sponsored curricula in American studies, and above all, the impact of movies. After the war, Hollywood resumed the dominance it had claimed in the 1920s, and Pells gives an entertaining account of tangles with France, particularly, over trade restrictions on films. Skeptical that anything injurious has occurred, and observing that cultural influence is mutual (witness European takeovers of American publishing and media companies), Pells still opens for us over here a window on why they're so anxious over there. Gilbert Taylor