American Avatar.

• Author: Quainton, Anthony C.E.
• Position: Book review

American Avatar: The United States in the Global Imagination by Barry A. Sanders, Potomac Books: Washington, DC, 2011, ISBN: 978-1597976817, 240 pp., $29.95

In this somewhat bizarrely named book - American Avatar - with its vaguely Hindu and Star Wars associations Barry Sanders seeks to identify the true embodiment of the American experience, to explain American values and to suggest ways in which America's image can be projected more effectively on a globalized world. Sanders, a lawyer and Southern California civic activist, gained renown as the lawyer for the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. He is a widely travelled and highly articulate writer with an encyclopedic knowledge of history and literature. He has observed how American is viewed from a variety of external vantage points and he uses these various perspectives to good effect throughout this book.

The first half of his book is an extensive, if somewhat cursory, compilation of images, both negative and positive of the United States. These, he suggests, arise out of the way American society is organized internally as well as out of how the United States acts abroad and overall as a result of the ways that the media projects the American image. One's mind is overwhelmed by his different categories: America is a beacon of liberty, a land of opportunity, conqueror, exploiter, imperialist, evangelist, dangerous policeman, crude materialist, racist, to mention but a few. The reader can conclude that America is dominant and arrogant, wealthy and successful, profligate, efficient and fat. In over 30 subsections Sanders dissects virtually every conceivable element of the American character and every common adjective applied to it from the founding of the republic until today. Each characteristic is briefly described often with colorful quotes from historians, critics and commentators both past and present, but the issues are also discussed at a level that is often very basic and at times truly simplistic. But by the end of the first section one has the picture: There is no one image of America that predominates. We are seen as an infinitely complex society with many virtues and even more vices. There is, in short, no single stereotype for what the American avatar is.

The second half of the book focuses on the rather more interesting question of how external viewers decide on which images of the United States to choose. Sanders begins by positing a natural predisposition of foreigners to...