Andrew Mueller, I Wouldn’t Start From Here: The 21st Century and Where It All Went Wrong (U.S. edition, 2009, Soft Skull)
purchase from Amazon

I Wouldn’t Start From Here is aptly titled, because you should skip Robert Young Pelton’s introduction. It’s a rant on how Americans need to read this book because we are all so lame and hate foreigners. Pelton has all the charm of someone who bought a copy of Let’s Go Thailand and a backpack the summer before law school, and now wants everyone to know how worldly he is because he smoked dope with a bunch of Canadians at a hostel on the Khe Sahn Road.  Well, if Americans hate funny things so much, why did we elect as our president a self-described “skinny kid with a funny name,” the son of a Kenyan, with a grandmother and half-siblings who live in a more-or-less traditional Kenyan village?

And yes, Robert Young Pelton had to know about the election when the introduction went to press, because Andrew Mueller writes about the revelry of November 4, 2008 for this edition. (The book was originally published in 2007 in Australia.) So skip his introduction, unless you are an American who believes that you are superior to all other Americans because you sometimes read the news on Guardian.co.uk. (more…)