If Only They Didn't Speak English: Notes From Trump's America

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The road and transport infrastructure is awful- John Kerry, visiting Haiti remarked that the state of the roads was better than in Washington! Quite an interesting read that really opened my eyes at just how different the culture across the pond actually is. Every time you need public to face any sort of artificial problem, the media involuntarily bring up that notion. On the downside, these same friendly, self-reliant Americans don’t drink enough and are way too much into god.

A well written account of the things that Jon Sopel really likes about the USA which, thankfully, chimes perfectly with what I've found, travelling there for around ten years. The last couple of chapters did feel a bit too Trump heavy and Sopel's self-proclaimed impartiality may have slightly been eroded, but that cannot shake the overwhelmingly informative and highly interesting narrative of the book overall. Proclaiming you have a special relationship with god and read the Bible every night doesn’t make you a good person and it certainly doesn’t make you presidential material…except in America. He finds many American people kind and generous but most find it anathema to pay too much income tax. One of the few rules you cannot abolish in the USA is a person’s Second Amendment right to bear arms.Sopel’s most glaring difficulty in writing about American culture is that he hasn’t lived here long enough to really get a handle on America. He has reported from all around the world, of course, but he is correct in saying that we could understand the US better if we consider it as the foreign country that it undoubtedly is to us. In the book Trump constitutes maybe 10% of the content- and this was a late add on which tops and tails the main body. The two examples cited by Sopel as indicative of the vanity and personal style of the President were Rex Tillotson and Admiral Jackson (physician turned politician in quick time! While the examples in the book and the headings are (of course) cherry-picked to emphasise the differences, and anyone who knows even a few Americans will realise that there are worlds of difference between individuals, just as in any country, one comes away with the impression that American society (and by extension, many of the individuals who comprise that society) is, by British standards, more than a little eccentric – maybe even completely bonkers in places.

Sopel brings a light touch in the style he presents his book in, it takes a heavy subject and gives it a little helium. The book is divided up into chapters that discuss the most important themes that define contemporary American culture, such as race relations, gun ownership, patriotism and attitudes to government.The author goes to some lengths to demonstrate how much more religious Americans are than any other Western country. A book that looks at America and Americans – the premise of the title is that the USA is a very foreign country indeed – very far away from the UK in many deeply fundamental ways, but because they speak English, we think of them as slightly eccentric siblings, rather than distant relatives with very different worldviews to those we have in Britain. Mr Sopel seeks to describe and explain the strong emotions running through each of these elements of American society and the good or ill they provoke. Citing commentators at the time of the Sandy Hook massacre that if the killing of 20 six-year-olds and seven-year-olds in 2012, along with six teachers, was not enough to bring about change in the legislation, then nothing will.