Discovering America as It Is

After a decade of living on American soil, journalist and anti-Soviet dissident Valdas Anelauskas offers his view of American culture and politics. In this eye-opening account, he offers an 'insider's view' of the most popular destinations of immigrants from around the world. What he finds is somewhat surprising, likening the United States practice of 'extreme capitalism' and the socialist Soviet order to two sides of the same coin. Discovering America as It Is also examines American foreign and domestic policy and wonders whether the United States is such a shining example of development after all. Anelauskas gave up his Soviet citizenship and came to America in 1988, on the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Human Rights.

In 1988 Valdas Anelauskas was a dissident journalist writing in the underground Lithuanian ''samizdat'' whose penetrating critique of Soviet Communism attracted the applause and promotion of a range of American anti-Soviet officials and agencies. By 1998, all that had changed: the Soviet Union was history, many of the imposing American institutions dedicated to its collapse had themselves evaporated, and Valdas Anelauskas had lived in America for almost a decade.

Discovering America as it Is provides one dissident''s eye-view of America, contrasting what Anelauskas terms "American extreme capitalism" not only with the former Soviet system, but also with the more humane operations of European and other capitalisms. It provides a highly recommended blow by blow analysis of the negative effects and ramifications of major U.S. social policy directions over the past decade and raises serious questions concerning America''s leading role as a model for development, and even its future competitivity due to the deterioration of its human capital resulting from antisocial domestic policies.