Anelauskas, we learn from the back cover and the autobiographical introduction, is a former anti-Soviet dissident from Lithuania who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1989. Under the sponsorship of the Tolstoy Foundation he came to the United States where he eagerly went to work for various anti-Soviet organizations and got to meet Newt Gingrich and Jesse Helms. He was looking forward to a lucrative career as a professional Commie basher when the Cold War cooled. Bad timing, he admits. Now the U.S. didn't look so good. The Tolstoy Foundation suggested he get a regular job, maybe at McDonald's. His response to this "ridiculous" request triggered an unsympathetic response from this reader as I think it may from others.

Why an obviously intelligent person should be so surprised that the U.S. is not a utopia, and why he is so outraged that he writes an almost five hundred page diatribe with over 2000 footnotes is the unanswered question raised by this book. He is honest enough to say that his family had been wealthy landowners before the Soviet takeover of Lithuania, but he does not seem to recognize that his aristocratic proclivities made him even less suited to American liberal democratic values than to Soviet totalitarianism. For example, he rants about crime in New York, claiming that "all the big cities in the Soviet Union of twenty years ago ... were completely safe at any time," and blames their current dangerous conditions on the introduction of capitalism (24). Sure, I've also been bothered by beggars and muggers on the streets of Washington, DC, but it's a small price to pay for living in a society where the police are expected to obey the laws.

Anelauskas's book is, of course, merely the latest in a familiar genre, the disillusioned immigrant's warning to his countrymen. It is a subject that needs study. Many of the immigrants most critical of the U.S. wrote in their native languages, as the contributors to Werner Sollors's Multilingual America point out. Discovering America As It Is also has similarities with the accounts by travelers whose aristocratic sympathies made them unhappy with American democratic behavior. Anelauskas sounds at times like Frances Trollope complaining of rudeness in American life: "...we endured three long years of boring hell in the neighboring 'garden state' of New Jersey -- the painfully dull life of American suburbia" (25).

Each chapter of Discovering America As It Is catalogs American economic and social inequalities. Side bars proclaim: "The number of year-round, full-time American workers who live in poverty is actually three times what official census figures would have us believe" (63). "In 1996, only twenty-eight percent of poor children were covered by Medicaid" (121). "A child born in the United States today has one chance in 432 of becoming a doctor but one chance in five of growing up illiterate" (162). There are hundreds of these factoids, all supported by references to generally reliable sources, but all wrenched from their original contexts. Most of us would agree that America should have better health care, child care, and schools; fewer guns and stupid television programs; and a foreign policy that is less tied to international business interests, but Anelauskas's encyclopedia of national failure omits any reference to the ways in which life in the U.S. is made tolerable, even joyful, by repeated victories by reformers in local elections, union negotiations, and the courts.

Yet, for every silly, extreme statement there are many honest criticisms of American life that should be taken seriously. Books such as this need to be read and discussed in American studies courses around the world to challenge us to think deeply about what America means to the disaffected and why everyone does not feel the same.