"Comprehensive. His judgments are full of good sense."
--Foreign Affairs
"A welcome addition to the passionate debate about the globalization of American culture."
--Village Voice
"A book that makes for interesting and challenging reading."
--International History Review
"The details are fascinating, the insights unfailingly illuminating. This is serious history at its entertaining
best."
--Allen J. Matusow, Rice University
"Richard Pells, one of our most distinguished cultural historians, has dramatically refocused the debate surrounding
the Americanization of global mass culture in his remarkable new book. Not Like Us is both a work of original scholarship
and a wonderful read�a bold, beautifully written account of the impact (and surprising limits) of Hollywood and
Burger King, the Marshall Plan and Disneyland, on Western Europe and the great world beyond."
--David M. Oshinsky, Rutgers University, author of A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy
"Not Like Us is guaranteed to hook any reader intrigued by the exercise of U.S. cultural influence�not just
military or economic power�over the past half century. How the transatlantic dialogue got to have so pronounced
an American accent, and what some of the consequences and implications have been, is a fascinating tale that Richard
Pells recounts with admirable verve, poise, and authority. In underscoring reciprocity as well as hegemony, this
engaging volume achieves balance and sophistication as well."
-Stephen J. Whitfield, Max Richter Professor of American Civilization, Brandeis University, author of The Culture
of the Cold War
"Richard Pells has written an important and illuminating book. The first comprehensive appraisal of the cultural
relations of the United States and Europe in the postwar years, thhis study reveals a history more complicated,
more interesting, and more directly relevant to contemporary cultural issues than one might have suspected."
--Thomas Bender, New York University, author of New York Intellect
"An excellent analysis of how Western Europeans viewed the very country that rescued many of them from the
tyranny of totalitarianism and, equally important, how countries are attracted to aspects of American popular culture
yet resistant to a globalized conformity."
--John Patrick Diggins, City University of New York, author of Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy
Perseus Book Group Web Site, February, 2002
Summary
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.
