“After 20 years of opining on weighty bilateral issues like NATO expansion and ballistic missile defense, the political analyst Nikolai V. Zlobin recently found himself trying to explain, for an uncomprehending Russian readership, the American phenomenon of the teenage baby sitter.”
In early December, Ellen Barry from the New York Times featured Nikolai Zlobin‘s new book “America — What a Life!” as an interesting read on Culture-Specific Insights and the perception of U.S. culture from another cultural value lens; in this case, the Russian lens.
But this book is not about the past or present political differences about these two countries. While Zoblin has been a political analyst for years, in this book he does not dive into the traditional narratives of political or diplomatic opposition between the United States and Russia. Rather, he looks at the most quotidian aspects of the U.S. American middle class and tries to explain them, with humor, to a Russian audience unfamiliar with such everyday-life matters. As the quote above reflects, one of the topics that the book tackles is “the U.S. American phenomenon of the teenage babysitter”, exploring the tendency of U.S. American parents to look for a youth (non-relative) to be a babysitter when they go out, while Russian parents would call the grandparents to take care of the children. While the tip of the iceberg may seem a bit boring, Zlobin takes this as an opportunity to reflect on the underlying, less-visible values of family and “grandparenthood” in both cultural contexts.
Another interesting read on this topic mentioned by Barry in her article on Zlobin is Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip, a diary of two Russians traveling in the United States and the positive impressions that they had.
Beyond these two books, there are many others that talk about foreign perceptions of a place or country, such as The Great Little Book of Fun Things You Probably Don’t Know About Ireland, a book about Ireland seen from the outside, particularly from an Irish-American perspective, or Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America, the memories of an Iranian girl growing up in the United States.
Can you tell us about similar insightful books that portray a culture from the outside in this manner? Share in this blog entry!