England, Bloody England: An Expatriate's Return by Lesley Hazleton

England, Bloody England: An Expatriate's Return Reviews

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  Tariq Mahmood

  Being an immigrant in England myself I was intrigued when I heard the author in an interview castigating her English home. Hence the reason why I picked up this book. I have to agree with the author that Britain is not as accommodating to immigrants as compared with Americans but I don't think the English are to be blamed. Their social communications is based on repression, inhibition indirection which makes it difficult for most immigrants to fit in. Also no one really knows what the English people are thinking as the language is coded. For example the use of public pronouncement the impersonal 'one' , which depersonalises as well as patronises at the same time. Also the use of phrases like, Do you really think so? and Oh really? Provides implies a deeper knowledge where there is none.
  In short the English are masters of avoiding the direct statement or confrontation which provides few opportunities for the immigrant to blend in. I guess I will have to apply to America as well......
• 
  Em

  The subtitle of this book is ‘An Expatriate’s Return.’ Yet it is not ‘till well into this book that the author really reveals herself, in the chapter about her youth, telling of her education as a Jewish girl. She tells of the racist golllywag toys, as if only in London you’d find such things. She speaks about feeling freer in her homeland only after she’s been gone so long as to be viewed a foreigner (American) by other Brits. She chides Anglophiles such as myself and attempts to open our eyes to the true England. But she has just such a romantic notion of the US seeing our culture as more open and energetic, yet because she is foreign she can’t know the energy is really a frenetic panic to keep from showing our insecurities and the openness and forthright speaking is really just for show and not at all real. The minds of Americans s are becoming increasingly closed and dark. But foreigners only notice a fraction of what exists here.
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  Nicole

  This one is a spy thriller more than a mystery and is a good period story as well.
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  Alex Smith

  Hazleton is a good essayist, but I didn't find her to be remotely as interesting as she appears to believe she is. At times (like in the chapter on Stratford) she seems like a caricature of the self-satisfied New York intellectual who lives to be dismissive. In addition, Hazleton never applies the same critical judgement to the United States that she does to England, so the book is badly skewed by the rose-colored glasses with which she views her adopted country This is particularly painful in her chapter on British racism, with the author condemning golliwogs and racial beatings in England, while ignoring, say, Aunt Jemima and lynchings in the U. S.