Pop Culture vs. Real America

Each essay in Pop Culture vs. Real Americans contains a surprise. Especially for readers who envision U.S. culture by the pop icons it has produced. American pop icons are sometimes for good but more often for ill.

Through our pop icons, the world sees a very different sort of American—vain and oversexed, miserly and self-obsessed, prone to violence, a bit nutty. This publication debunks that imaginary America of pop culture.

Instead real-life portraits drawn from life lack the caricatures inflated from conjecture, misjudgment, and distorted anecdote. They present a less sensational, more prosaic, and, in the end, more moving and more human view of Americans. One sees a nation of real people, at once big-hearted, hard working, painstaking, imaginative, stirred by fellow feeling, and on the whole quite admirable.

Book (80 pgs)