Rating: 
Summary: Zerzan reviews "America" for
Review: ".....Baudrillard moved toward his present outlook of bleak fatalism, presenting, with much hyperbole and abstract phrase-making, a world dominated by electronic media and moving into an almost science-fiction realm of freedom and unconnectedness.
With terms like the 'end of the social' and the 'catasrophe of meaning', he depicts an increasingly high-tech reality that is no longer quite real but somehow a simulation, immune to critique or revolt, approaching a kind of black-hole quality where images and events no longer have identifiable refrence points.
Early on we learn that , in its naive energy, America is 'the only remaining primitive society', that everything in it, despite the level of technology, 'still bears the marks of a primitive society', and that it's primitivism has passed into the 'character of a universe that is beyond us, that far outstrips its own moral, social, or ecological rationale.'
One is tempted to wonder whether in such phrases, never explained, this word-drunk French traveler is his theory's own best personification---the term 'extermination of meaning' comes to mind.....Baudrillard continues to rhapsodize about the 'power of uncuulture', the wonderfully unreflective nature of Americans. In a passage somehow refering to Poterville, California, he applauds 'the whole of life as a drive-in. Truly magnificent.' This we are told, is the 'true utopian society'. I'm not kidding. Does this have a ring of familiarity? All this nonsense is really what one has heard before: in high school civics class, in political science courses and other forms of overt propaganda: the old these of American exceptionalism, American egalitarianism, American pluralism, from Tocqueville et al. One doubts that he has even heard these tired lines, to be able to reproduce them, as he does, without embarrassment."
Rating: 
Summary: interesting and right on target
Review: america as what it is, "the spectacle", a mediated and wholly illusory paradise where the secret party line, "all is well, all is well", is frantically perpetuated by tv and magazines. scary and absolutely accurate.
Rating: 
Summary: French impressionists insightful reflections of America
Review: Here you can read a modern French philosopher's impressions of America. The author writes poetically and impressionistically about his visits to California and New York and points in between. He is simultaneously impressed, charmed, confounded, curious, and intrigued by this big country and its people, in contrast to Europe and Europeans. This is not so much a travelogue, but rather a gentle and thoughtful dissection of American culture, done in drive-by fashion, taking in the architecture, billboards, men and women on the sidewalks, the corner stop-and-shops, the geography, the highways, deserts, even the skies. This is not a book putting down America, as one might eroneously assume, but neither is it a pat-on-the-back. For American readers, it will serve as a mirror that reflects striking realities, both flattering and not, that, nevertheless, have become so common to us Americans that they are practically invisible to us, if not for the insightful light shined by this urbane French writer. Think of this book as a French impressionistic painting of America,--more in the "people-caught-in-the-act" style of Manet, rather than Monet with his lillies and haystacks--where the mundane, the ugly, the beautiful and the grandiose blend into a composition of insight, harmony and even-handed judgement of the particulars.
Rating:
Summary: French impressionists insightful reflections of America
Review: Here you can read a modern French philosopher's impressions of America. The author writes poetically and impressionistically about his visits to California and New York and points in between. He is simultaneously impressed, charmed, confounded, curious, and intrigued by this big country and its people, in contrast to Europe and Europeans. This is not so much a travelogue, but rather a gentle and thoughtful dissection of American culture, done in drive-by fashion, taking in the architecture, billboards, men and women on the sidewalks, the corner stop-and-shops, the geography, the highways, deserts, even the skies. This is not a book putting down America, as one might eroneously assume, but neither is it a pat-on-the-back. For American readers, it will serve as a mirror that reflects striking realities, both flattering and not, that, nevertheless, have become so common to us Americans that they are practically invisible to us, if not for the insightful light shined by this urbane French writer. Think of this book as a French impressionistic painting of America,--more in the "people-caught-in-the-act" style of Manet, rather than Monet with his lillies and haystacks--where the mundane, the ugly, the beautiful and the grandiose blend into a composition of insight, harmony and even-handed judgement of the particulars.
Rating:
Summary: garden variety platitude
Review: I've been waiting a long time to read a piece of non-fiction that is as beautifully written as this book is. It is as if Baudrillard traveled to the future, read the first great 21st Century novel and retold the story except that he completely forgot the narrative, and left us with only the protagonist's thoughts. Sure he missteps a couple of times and you're left with the impression by the end of certain paragraphs that instead of offering the reader a real observation Baudrillard has merely circumnavigated the semblance of one, but where else have you read a thinker as ambitious as to try to convey in such an intimate manner a critique of a culture that doesn't relate to each individual directly as much as it exchanges symbols of communication. I give this book 4 stars as a first time read due to some of its thornier prose, but I'm sure that as the reader returns to this book he or she will become convinced that it is truly a 5 star achievment.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful prose
Review: I've been waiting a long time to read a piece of non-fiction that is as beautifully written as this book is. It is as if Baudrillard traveled to the future, read the first great 21st Century novel and retold the story except that he completely forgot the narrative, and left us with only the protagonist's thoughts. Sure he missteps a couple of times and you're left with the impression by the end of certain paragraphs that instead of offering the reader a real observation Baudrillard has merely circumnavigated the semblance of one, but where else have you read a thinker as ambitious as to try to convey in such an intimate manner a critique of a culture that doesn't relate to each individual directly as much as it exchanges symbols of communication. I give this book 4 stars as a first time read due to some of its thornier prose, but I'm sure that as the reader returns to this book he or she will become convinced that it is truly a 5 star achievment.
Rating:
Summary: garden variety platitude
Review: Looking for an interesting critique of America? Look elsewhere. Baudrillard is your garden variety old European who likes to spill ink. The following citation from the author's "the Spirit of Terrorism" illustrates his 'thinking':"That we have dreamed of this event [i.e. the September 11 terrorist attacks], that everybody without exception has dreamt of it, because everybody must dream of the destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree, - this is unacceptable for Western moral conscience, but it is still a fact ... It is almost they who did it, but we who wanted it" Such intellectual atrocities are not uncommon in old Europe. But they are uninteresting. So if you're interested in critical intellecutal discourse about America, you're better off reading the 'Economist'.
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Summary: Frenchman lost in the desert.
Review: Sure it's snobbish, and sure its condescending and overtly pretentious (Baudrillard's irony cuts both ways, because he admits this point about Europeans), but dry and dull - never. As stream of consciousness travelogue it clicks into the desert mode immediately, pure beatitude and horizonal text. Like Kerouac with brains, Baudrillard attempts to dissect American culture but ends up coming over more wide-eyed and niave than the Dhama bum could ever acchieve. The only real concrete attempt at discussing America comes in the final chapter where Baudrillard turns towards the simulated power-state the nation has become, and as always the ideas are beyond reproach. Despite it's alientated ignorance and innocence (Baudrillard confused in 'utopia-acchieved') this is a ravishing and colourful text that has few peers in modern cultural deconstruction.
Rating: 
Summary: Remarkably Unremarkable
Review: The collection of musings drones on and on and on attempting to duct tape together an understanding of American culture with big words (this may be a result of translation, flavored to entice an intellectual crowd) and anecdotes based on localized behaviors. One can't really argue with an opinion and that's one of the things that bugs me, he doesn't say anything. Or rather he says a couple of things and references the same pseudo-overly-sophisticated theories based on disparate analogies. Case in point: when speaking about "a new development in the field of sexuality" which is basically that our definition of sexual identity is some sort of blurred intentional confusion, he references three people: Michael Jackson, Boy George, and David Bowie. I would think that if one were writing a book titled, "America" and making generalizations about them, one should at least reference Americans.
Admittedly, some of his observations are insightful, witty and funny but not worth what you have to wade through for these gems (I giggled for 10 minutes after reading the description of marathon runners). He believes that this exercise is, among other things a form of asceticism. I believe that enduring the entirety of his overly-large-typefaced-so-I-can-make-money-on-my-postcards book is the true asceticism.
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Summary: Filling your mind to the Emptiness of America's Society
Review: The desserts in America...vast, never ending..empty. Such is the make up of America, an empty shell with no roots like the plantless dessert. Read this book and you too will see how Empty America is.
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