America
From the sierras of New Mexico to the streets of New York and LA by night—"a sort of luminous, geometric, incandescent immensity"—Baudrillard mixes aperçus and observations with a wicked sense of fun to provide a unique insight into the country that dominates our world. In this new edition, leading cultural critic and novelist Geoff Dyer offers a thoughtful and perceptive take on the continued resonance of Baudrillard’s America.
Paperback, 160 pages
ISBN: 9781844676828
September 2010
$19.95 / £9.99
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Other Editions
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Paperback, 200 pages
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ISBN: 9780860919780
September 1989
$21.95 / £13.00
Reviews
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Occasionally provocative and almost always infuriating … America is filled with perceptive, almost poetic observations.
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Since de Tocqueville, French thinkers have been fascinated with America. But when it comes to mysterious paradoxes and lyrical complexity no French intellectual matches Jean Baudrillard in contemplating the New World.
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A mixture of crazy notions and dead-on insights, America is a valuable (and voluble) picture of what Mr. Baudrillard calls ‘the only remaining primitive society’ … ours.
Blog
Baudrillard's “stunning” America one of the Financial Times’ best non-fiction books of 2010
Edwin Heathcote, the Financial Times' architecture critic, selects Jean Baudrillard's America as one of the best non-fiction books of 2010:
Baudrillard's stunning contemplation on the vastness of the US was first published in English in 1988 and is reissued here with an excellent introduction by Geoff Dyer.
Visit the Financial Times to read the full list.
Baudrillard's American road trip still resonates with P. D. Smith
Writing in the Guardian, PD Smith finds Jean Baudrillard's reflections on his travels through America in the early 1980s to be, "original, memorable and even funny".
Written while Reagan was president, Baudrillard's provocative account of this "obsessional society" remains relevant. From the "steepling gentleness" of New York's skyscrapers to the "limitless horizontality" of Los Angeles, he explores this New World, where the carpets have an "orgasmic elasticity" and the people are "like shadows that have escaped from Plato's cave.
Discussions
Begin a discussionOther books by Jean Baudrillard
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Impossible Exchange
Jean Baudrillard's now familiar investigations into reality and hyper-reality shift here into a more metaphysical frame. -
Passwords
In the spirit of Gilles Deleuze’s Abécédaire, Passwords offers us twelve entry points into Baudrillard’s thought.
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The Transparency of Evil
Sex, technology, politics and disease in Western culture, after the ‘orgy’ of the 1960s.
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The Perfect Crime
Baudrillard investigates the murder of reality—“the most important event of modern history.”
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Fragments
Disturbing and vivid meditations on the meanings of objects and sensations.
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The System of Objects
A tour de force of the materialist semiotics of the early Baudrillard.
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The Spirit of Terrorism
Until September 11 we had had no symbolic event on a world scale that marked a setback for globalization itself. -
Cool Memories IV
In this fourth collection of fragments and sketches, Baudrillard’s stance is that of a barely participant observer, rather than an interventionist intellectual.
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Cool Memories
Cool Memories is the other side of America, the disillusioned side, presented in the form of a diary, though not in the classical sense.