I HAVE read dozens of books profoundly analysing the conundrum named the United States of America by some of the world’s most erudite minds. The list includes writers, journalists, academics, artists, philosophers, former non-American diplomats, former American diplomats, and former leaders of foreign governments. But for me the best I have seen so far is by Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books, Vol. 48, No. 2, February 5, 2026, titled “Another country.”
I don’t think any human currently on Planet Earth can better understand who or what the US is if they do not read Shatz. This is fine scholarship that reaches into the labyrinthine corners of intellectual analysis and produces a study that provides the definitive conclusion about just what this place on earth called the USA is.
I spent the beginning hours of Tuesday morning reading this 8000-word essay that Shatz should develop into a book. I would recommend any university lecturer that teaches American politics and/or International Relations or a course in Comparative Politics or Contemporary Political Theory or a course on 20th-century civilization (a course I did when I was at McMaster University, which was one of all time my favourites university courses) to put this 8000-word essay on their reading list.
It is difficult to review this essay in a newspaper column, and I don’t want to serialize the column. What I will do is twofold. I will reproduce a selection of Shatz of the thinking of great minds on what they had to say about the US and I will offer an ending quote from the author himself.
A word before I do the reproduction. I honestly was not surprised by the analysis and description of the US by Shatz and the quotes he offered of how others saw the US. I have never been enamoured or attracted to the United States. I would like to think my ontological DNA revolted against any potential embrace of the US. I was never tempted to visit the US. I am in my early seventies, and I have seen the USA for just three days in 2000 when I did eye surgery in Miami. From hospital to airport.
Sorry to disappoint you with this tiny rather than a broader review, but here now are the people Shatz quoted, followed by a quote from Shatz himself. All of the people Shatz cited are world famous personalities of deep minds.
James Baldwin –“The very word “America”remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun. No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans.”
Serge Daney – “America is a place that makes it possible to dream, but also the corner of reality that dreams crash into.”
Pierre Melville, “America is the sublime and the abominable”’
Franz Fanon – “Two centuries ago a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States became a monster, in which the … sickness and inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.”
George Kennan – “America is a prehistoric monster with a ‘brain the size of a pin.”
Simone de Beauvoir – “America is a ‘battlefield and you can only become passionate about the battle it is waging with itself, in which the stakes are beyond measure.”
Anders Stephanson – “The alarming fact is that everyone on this earth has an enormous stake in how the United States chooses to be and act in this world.”
Frederick Douglass – “America is a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”
CLR James – “The US, the greatest power in Western civilization no longer knows what to believe about itself.”
Martin Luther King – “Nothing provides the communists with a better climate for expansion and infiltration than the continued alliance of our nation with racism and exploitation throughout the world.”
Amin Maalouf – “Americans have the means to rid the human species of all the plagues that assail it … and here we are, however, launched at full speed in the opposite direction.”
Amiri Baraka – “One of the most baffling things about America is that despite its essentially vile profile, so much beauty continues to exist here.”
The quotes here are not fully contextualised especially the ones from Baldwin, de Beauvoir and King, so there are more meaning to what they had to say. I end with the final paragraph by Shatz himself: “What I mostly feel these days, as I look at the disaster unfolding in America and its horrifying repercussions throughout the world, is an intense sense of shame. Shame isn’t a pleasant emotion, but any honest reckoning with what my country has become has to start with it.”
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.
