Autocracy in America

And here's the other chap from the tee-vee. Stephen Fry is a crazily intelligent dude, a high-functioning tech geek who has also proven himself a brilliant writer, solid comedian (with stints in Blackadder and A Bit of Fry and Laurie), wonderful actor (see: Wilde) and is pretty ubiquitous as an early adopter of Twitter, though depending on your patience for "NOW I AM IN THE CAR DRIVING" tweets, he's not everyone's cup of tea.

But in this book, he's at his best. Thoughtful, empathetic, with a sense of humor. Basically, the BBC gave Fry a London taxicab to drive through America while being filmed; the resulting travelogue aired on the channel and allowed him fodder enough to fill a book with his musings and narratives from all fifty states. He makes no bones about missing a massive amount (Idaho gets a brief stop-by so he can check out the continental divide, and that's IT) but as he argues in his preface, the mistakes of a foreigner writing about your country only helps you get in touch with what seems important to you.

In any event, it's a good, fun, light read -- some fascinating stuff on the South (fascinating at least to me, whose experience with the region tends to be limited to driving-through and reading about it in books like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which seems to me must be designed to have something of an Orientalizing effect on the region) and a general fascination -- not romantic, not sneering -- with the American character. Good stuff. And let me tell you, he NAILS how Minnesotans are about ice fishing. To the WALL.