Martijn de Waal

In the spring of 2002 Podium published my travelogue Amerika: toets 1 voor het paradijs. (English translation: America: Dial P for Paradise). This book describes the year that I was working in Silicon Valley as a journalist covering the Dotcomboom of these days for the Dutch media. During the year I make a small number of trips to cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix to visit old friends whom I had met during a High School Exchange program, ten years earlier, during which I spent my junior year in High School in the small town of Ignacio, Colorado – culturally the opposite of my correspondent post in liberal San Francisco. I also go back to visit Ignacio itself, to attend my ten year high school reunion.

For me, the book deals with the fascinating relation (better: paradox) between individuality and community that seems to be at the heart of the myth of the American Dream. I attend a High School Leadership Seminar in which 16th year kids are told that ‘everyone is a leader’, I visit a newly designed gated community in Scottsdale Arizona that through its marketing is sold as a place for rugged individuals, while at the same time it sets very strict rules for its inhabitants. On an outing to Burning Man in the Black Rock Desert I cannot help to note that – although the ideology is of course different – in its essence the whole set-up reminded me of a Arizona style gated community: there is a big gate around the premises, and again both individuality and community are stressed in what I find an interesting paradox.

This is what the Dutch Press had to say about the book:
‘ a perfect sociology of his host country, made with almost scientific inquisitiveness’ (HP/De Tijd).

See the page I made for the book, back in 2002.