We can do little to escape the experience of the United States of America through many media: TV, pop music, youth culture, Hollywood, fast food. How do these traces and images affect us? Do we internalize them, want to be American? Do we (can we?) resist them? Is our desire for them a symptom of European pop culture's crisis? From black face minstrelsy, rap music and fiction to McDonald's, rock festivals and Star Trek, the cultural conception of America is critically unpacked by contributors from Europe, Israel and the USA. McKay rounds off the picture by offering a comprehensive introduction that explains theoretical approaches to Americanization from the thesis of Yankee cultural imperialism to America as site of liberation or fantasy.

M. E. GRANT is a pseudonym for Gard E. Norberg, and refers to his emigrant status. A Swede by birth, and a dedicated environmentalist, he has been a regular contributor to the British monthly, The Ecologist, and one of his essays written for that magazine was recently included in Visions Across the Americas, a collection of essays by mostly American writers - including such well-known authors as Gore Vidal, Isaac Asimov, Garrison Keillor, Maya Angelou, Ray Bradbury, Alice Walker, and Martin Luther King Jr. There is a saying in Swedish that, loosely translated, means "You chastise the one you love," and 'YANKEE GO HOME - But Please Take Me With You' is an hilariously funny critique of some of the more egregious manifestations of 'the American way of life'. But, as the title indicates, most foreigners critical of the United States would give almost anything for the privilege of living here. The 83-year old author owns some property in Costa Rica, but he and his American-born wife spend most of their time in a condo in Dania Beach, the Florida town that was founded by Danish immigrants, and which this year celebrates its centennial as the oldest city in Broward County.