Fantastically rich and triumphantly in league with the future, America still hankers after innocence from foreign contagion and home-grown vice. Few writers have explored this mixture of headlong progress and nostalgia for a not-quite-mythical past as incisively as Eric Schlosser.
Here he looks at three sources of hypocrisy, cruelty and occasional grandeur in the country's attempts to make sense of a disturbing world: pornography, drugs and migrant labour.
Whether investigating the fall-out from the country's relentless and utterly ineffectual war on marijuana, the fate of migrant workers in a nation of immigrants, or the career of the "Walt Disney of Porn", Schlosser has few rivals as the chronicler of a country exhilarated and terrified by its own potential.
