VERY LOVELY PEOPLE: A Personal Look at Some Americans Living Abroad

by Ludovic Kennedy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1969

Ludovic Kennedy, British writer and commentator, ""decided it would be fun, as a citizen of the country that had produced the old colonialists, to see how the new ones were doing and at the same time to show that not all Americans are the stereotypes so many people think."" So, after preliminary New York visits to (speaking of sterotypes) Pan Am, the Interchurch Center, the NAACP, Readers' Digest, Coca-Cola, and First National City Bank, it was off around the world throughout 1965, tracking down or just bumping into Americans abroad: Peace Corpsmen, missionaries, entrepreneurs both successful and unsuccessful, diplomats, GI's, students, AID officials, airline stewardesses, plain ordinary people, and Jinx Falkenberg's brother Bob. The result is a talky, often tedious travelogue only barely buoyed up by Mr. Kennedy's abundant faith that the reader will find it fun too. His style, he confesses, owes something to TV, and the bulk of the book is comprised of genial conversations with everyone he encounters along the way that eventually, though far from always, drift around to the subject of those ugly or lovely Americans. The discussions with the Americans themselves tend to dwell overly long on their individual concerns: silk manufacture, birth control, Zen, medical care, the ice cream business, etc. Despite a visit to Vietnam and hobnobbing with American correspondents there, the general tone throughout the Grand Tour is unpolitical and uncontroversial, reflecting both the pre-militant mood of '65 and Kennedy's own approach. After chatting his way through Latin America, Africa, Europe, and the Near, Middle, and Far East, Kennedy lands in Los Angeles, to be greeted by a bad breath commercial: ""I was well and truly back where I had started,"" and, boy, was it a long trek.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1969

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1969

Categories: NONFICTION