American Vertigo

American Vertigo. Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville.
by
Bernard-Henri Levy
(Random House, 2006)

From the front flap:

What does it mean to be American, and what can America be today? To answer these questions, celebrated philosopher and journalist Bernard-Henri Levy spent a year traveling throughout the country... The result is ... a fascinating, wholly fresh look at a country we sometimes only think we know.

Quote from within:

And then, farther down the road, the Hearst Castle, set on an arid mountain facing the ocean: San Simeon, bombastic kitsch, as big as one-fourth of Rhode Island, where I arrive full of emotion (wasn't this, after all, the model for Citizen Kane's Xanadu, the fortress of solitude where Orson Welles brought to life, and enclosed, his character?) but which I leave, an hour later, torn between irrepressible and contradictory wishes to laugh, to vomit, and yet at times to applaud.