art by any kind of cultural war, contrary to the claims of intellectuals on both the right and left and to the politicians who seek personal advantage from pursuing such claims. Instead, writes Wolfe, Americans are in general a practical people, willing to accept the differences that they see in others so long as they can also see good in these people and who are willing to adopt to and accept and sometimes even revel in social change.
The result of such conclusions is occasionally slightly annoying in a cloying, almost Pollyanna-ish sort of way. One can imagine a traveler coming to this country for the first time with no experience of American ways and nothing else to guide him or her in what to expect except for Wolfe's book. That person would undoubtedly be surprised and not in particularly pleasant ways by many of the things that he or she encountered. For while the United States is hardly the seething mass of discontent, immorality and hate, it is not entirely the happy, essentially untroubled and homogeneous democracy that Wolfe is painting a picture of.
Wolfe's work is a very rich book in large measure because of the research methodology that he used in creating it, a method that is essentially ethnographic and anthropological. This is in no small part ironic for someone whose formal tra
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