A book review by The Movie Snob.

Anti-Americanism, by Jean-Francois Revel. Published in France in 2000 and in America in 2003, this book is a novelty--a defense of America against foreign (principally European) critics by, of all people, a Frenchman. Without denying that American society has its faults and defects, he convicts the European press and elites of ignoring obvious facts in their haste to condemn America in terms that are frequently hysterical and sometimes self-contradictory. This knee-jerk tendency to condemn everything America does, he argues, only weakens non-Americans' ability to influence American conduct when it is actually objectionable. And he notes that the anti-Americanism of non-American officials and elites is frequently not shared by the general mass of people for whom they purport to speak, who often consume American products and culture with enthusiasm. Although his thesis seems plausible enough, the book is not particularly well-written or well-organized, flitting from topic to topic in apparently random fashion without developing any in depth, rather undercutting its persuasiveness.