This is a book written in 2022 by Italian journalist, writer, and lecturer Federico Rampini (1956). The author delves into the conditions, identity, and history of the United States. He traces its main characteristics and peculiarities, the features of its society, the differences from one coast to the other and what life is like.

He investigates the rising record of the start-up on one hand and the tragic issue of mass shootings on the other, the low rates of youth unemployment and the internal migration from California to Florida.

Rampini has lived in the United States for almost twenty-five years, therefore he can provide those insights and that knowledge and competence that only someone who has experienced life in this country can possess; from exploring its ethnic and cultural differences to knowing how much taxes one needs to pay, how the education system works, how to get health insurance, how to buy a house and what it means to be called to jury duty.  

He “signs an illuminating portrait of the United States that identifies the country's big and small problems”.

Rampini is also able to provide a comparison with Europe highlighting not only the differences between the two places but also the reasons and origins of them; he does so from different perspectives and topics, politics and economy, culture and society, daily life, and identity of the country.

In fact, “the author makes a slalom between contradictions, a cleansing from preconceptions, and gives us a travel guide in the literal sense: because one can only understand America by living it and looking behind appearances. To perhaps intuit where it will end up”.

Federico Rampini is an Italian author and journalist, who was born in Genova in 1956 and who began his career in 1977. From 1979 to 1982, he wrote for the magazine “Rinascita”, which had to leave after publishing an investigation into corruption within the Italian Communist Party. Afterwards, he was vice director of “Il Sole 24 Ore” and then he worked for “La Repubblica” first as head of the newsroom in Milan and then as correspondent from Paris, Brussel - in particular, from 1997 until 2000 he was European editor at the newspaper and followed the establishment of the common currency - and San Francisco. In this capacity, he covered what was happening in the Silicon Valley and then he opened the correspondent office in Beijing; focusing on global economy he worked in India, Japan, South-East Asia and Korea.

Furthermore, he taught at the University of Berkeley, Shanghai and at the Master at the Bocconi University in Milan. In 2005, he won the “Luigi Barzini” prize for journalism and the “Saint Vincent” one in 2006.

Rampini has been living in New York since 2009 and he is an accredited journalist at the White House, often travelling alongside the President of the United States and covering the G7 and G20 summits. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and Washington and worked with the Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership organizing the Congress of Vienna in 2015. What is more, he is often a lecturer at several U.S. universities, such as Columbia, Berkeley and Penn State, and at the Asia Society of New York.

In this book, Rampini takes on the challenge to understand the United States at its deep core, overcoming and going beyond the stereotypes created by movies, literature, fashion, art, music and tv series and what it seems like a growing old sentiment of Anti-Americanism which is influencing many Italians.

As a matter of fact, the book has been described as a work that has been able to depict “the many faces of the United States described by a chronicler who does not limit himself to facade representations and clichés of a country that, observed at its deepest heart, escapes Enlightenment prejudices”.