Pardonnez-moi while I critique your country

After reading American Vertigo, I have decided that countries and families have one major thing in common - no matter how critical you might be of your own, you still don't welcome criticism from outsiders.

And there is no lack of criticism in Bernard-Henri Lévy's American Vertigo, a vibrant and rollicking travelogue of a yearlong road trip through the United States.

On an assignment for The Atlantic Monthly, Lévy set out to follow in the footsteps of fellow Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" has made him something of an American prophet (and required reading in government classes across the US). [ Editor's note:The original version attributed the assignment to the wrong magazine. ]

Though Tocqueville's observations are often critical and flawed, they are always a joy to read. The precision of thinking and the wonderful logic yield some impressive predictions (among other things, the Civil War).

So one can't help but start "American Vertigo" with a thirst for Tocqueville's sharp eye and the hope that this book will offer something equivalent to Tocqueville's take on where the US stands today. Lévy certainly picked big shoes to fill.

He starts his journey in the Northeast and works his way across the top of the country, down the West Coast and then back through the South. Along the way, he meets up with an impressive selection of A-listers, including Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, John Kerry, Sharon Stone, Warren Beatty, and Norman Mailer.

But from the get-go, Lévy seems to go out of his way to seek out the very worst aspects of American culture. He visits myriad strip clubs, megachurches using marketing techniques to target a maximum number of "customers - sorry - potential faithful," a San Francisco sex club, a death-row prison, a Las Vegas brothel, a Texas gunshow where Nazi paraphernalia is being sold, and, of course, the country's largest mall in Minnesota.

Yes, this is part of America - and such cultural sideshows certainly make for a number of colorful stories. But it all gives one the feeling that Lévy had his ideas about the fanatical, selfish, overfed, wildly materialistic American population firmly in place before his plane hit the tarmac. And he set out to find it.

The overall effect is that of having a stranger point out the very worst characteristics of your family members without seeming to notice any of the good stuff. Sure, your grandmother might be racist, but that's not all she is, and she is your grandmother.

What's worse, Lévy's own political biases infect everything he writes, making many of his opinions tiresome and predictable.

He spends pages deriding President Bush. He hates Texas, but finds that he loves Seattle because it is "so obstinately European." He adores New Orleans, John F. Kennedy, and Bill Clinton, and admires John Kerry for being - you guessed it - "European at heart."

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