Black, opinionated, and from a working-class background, Gary Younge is not your typical foreign correspondent. Yet, in three years as The Guardian newspaper's New York correspondent, Younge has acquired a transatlantic reputation as one of the most thoughtful commentators on contemporary America.

In these pages we take the stage with an extravagantly attired drag queen in John Ashcroft's hometown, join the dinner table of a fundamentalist Republican who has just lost his son in the Iraq war, and ride a bus with a group of illegal immigrants on a latter-day Freedom Ride to Washington, DC. We also listen in on expansive discussions with, among others, Warren Beatty, Michael Moore, Louis Farrakhan, the late Susan Sontag, and Maya Angelou. And throughout, we are in the company of a guide whose unique insights into the American psyche make for memorable reading.

Taking full advantage of his outsider status, Younge provides a fresh perspective on a nation that is at once growing more isolated from the rest of the world and bitterly divided against itself.