Overview

This Is America: Portrait of a Nation at 250 offers a bold, eye-opening journey into the cultural DNA of the United States. Drawing on three decades of research, thousands of miles of travel, and more than 160 interviews, sociologist Gad Yair uncovers the deep cultural codes that define America at its 250th anniversary. From Puritan sermons to presidential speeches, from the frontier to the stars, from Black Lives Matter protests to school shooting memorials, Yair reveals how history and culture quietly shape everyday American life. He shows how the American Dream coexists with illusion, how rights fuel both unity and conflict, why paranoia thrives, and how capitalism and faith remain twin engines of national destiny. Standing in the tradition of Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, and Jean Baudrillard, Yair delivers a contemporary cultural portrait that is as analytical as it is alive. Blending sociology with vivid storytelling, he brings readers face to face with America's contradictions: freedom and inequality, belonging and loneliness, pragmatism and idealism. Richly illustrated with the author's own photographs, This Is America is both a scholarly contribution and a captivating narrative-an indispensable guide for anyone seeking to understand the United States as it enters its 250th year.

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Reviews

""I've just finished reading This Is America: A Portrait with great interest. My academic background includes an MA in International Relations and a PhD in American History from the University of Toronto. Many of the book's insights resonated deeply-some were familiar to me from personal experience and from foreign policy research, but the focused illumination and pointed examples added depth and clarity. I plan to incorporate several of these insights into the courses I teach at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and elsewhere. The most striking and original insight, in my view, is the persistent pressure for conformity in American society. I believe this pressure is directly linked to the well-known pathology of 'groupthink' in foreign policy decision-making-clearly visible in events such as the Bay of Pigs, the Iran-Contra affair, and the run-up to the Iraq War. Thank you for this profound and thought-provoking reading experience.""- Dr. Noam Kochavi, Department of International Relations, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem""Much has been said about the 'two Americas'-divided along lines of race, religion, economy, education, and politics. Against this backdrop, Professor Gad Yair's choice to focus on what unites Americans, rather than what divides them, is both bold and refreshing. This Is America: A Portrait does not describe 'many Americas, ' but rather seeks the shared spirit of 'the Americans'-in the collective sense. The book paints a coherent, intelligent, and thought-provoking cultural profile of what binds Americans across right and left, past and present. Yair weaves interviews, observations, anecdotes, and fieldwork into a fascinating mosaic of a complex yet resilient nation. Written in a clear and engaging style, the book is accessible to general readers without sacrificing analytical depth. It reads like a polished journalistic essay with the power of serious nonfiction.""- Nadav Rett, Epoch Magazine""This Is America: A Portrait is a fascinating book. It draws readers deep into the heart of American cultural experiences and offers a colorful, richly detailed picture-especially useful for Israeli readers trying to understand the cultural backstory behind headlines from the U.S. Professor Yair presents complex insights in a remarkably lucid and accessible way. For example, the chapter on American organizational and service culture is essential reading for anyone working with American colleagues. He shows how smiling is more than manners; how assembly-line logic underpins both the economy and workplace discipline; and how even fast food employees operate in a system that prizes repetition over reflection. These cultural codes explain why even humor videos-like the one where a fast-food cashier, on autopilot, asks a grieving customer 'How was your day?' and responds, without missing a beat, 'Glad to hear that!'-make perfect sense once you understand the logic behind them.""- Dr. Hanan Cohen, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Author Information

Gad Yair is Full Professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he holds the Louis and Ann Wolens Chair in Educational Research. A Fulbright alumnus at the University of Chicago and former Visiting Research Professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, Yair has held appointments at leading institutions worldwide, including the Free University of Berlin and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His scholarship spans cultural sociology, national character, education, and collective identity, with a special focus on how cultural trauma shapes nations. Author of numerous books, among them The Code of Israeliness, The Unruly Mind, and Love Is Not Praktish, he has published over 100 scholarly articles in leading journals. Yair is an award-winning teacher, a sought-after speaker, a YouTuber anda frequent commentator on Israeli and American culture. This is America: Portrait of a Nation at 250 is the culmination of decades of travel, interviews, and cross-cultural research.

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