Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and The Myth of Converging Values Hardcover – January 1, 2003

It's too bad that this book is not available in the US but easily ships from Canada (check out the author's website). The title should say how the US is drifting to the right while the most of our allies and friends are going the other direction; perhaps that explains the lack of support in Iraq. The Christian Right has a huge influence in this country whereas in Canada and Western Europe church attendance continues to decline. The book explains many interesting trends but the one that sticks out for me is that in the US, 59% of the population feels the man should be head of the household; in Canada that number is in the low teens.

As a European with close links to Canada and many American friends, I found this book absolutely fascinating. A must-read for anyone who is tempted to lump the two countries together. They could not be more different. Too bad for "thin-skinned' Americans. They have laboured far too long under the erroneous illusion that their country is the best place in the world to live in.

I bought this book because I am an American who just moved to Canada and you can not go into a book shop without having this book prominently displayed. It is everywhere so I figured "when in Rome" and picked up a copy. The book is the detail of the authors studies of the American and Canadian cultures and if they are becoming more similar or growing apart. The author lets the reader know up front two very important things, first that the book is meant for a Canadian audience and secondly that the author is a full time professional sociological researcher.For the first important point, that the book is meant for a Canadian audience, if you are a thin skinned American then I would not suggest you reading this book. It is not that the author takes any nasty cheap shots at Americans. It is just that he does not sugar coat the differences when they are more negative toward the American side. I could not argue with any of his comments, it was just that he was exposing some of the rather unsightly bits about the US and at times that can be uncomfortable for an American.The second point I felt was important was that the author is not an author by trade, but basically a researcher. This meant that this book was one of the most difficult to read and unnecessarily dense books I have read in a long time. If the author could have said a sentence in five words he used 25 and used a fair number a words that the common reader has never heard of. If you buy the book keep going through the painful first chapter, the road gets better after about 40 pages but the book is never a walk in the park.With these criticisms aside I did find parts of the book interesting. It would be good for an American to read these types of books to detail out the differences between the two countries and maybe to show them that all things American are not always the best. It is just that this book is so unfriendly to the reader that I do not think this is the vehicle for wide appeal.

For those who were looking for a fair comparison between the two most geographically endowed nations on the planet, you will not find it here. Michael Adam's approach suffers from a bias that paints the United States an irrational, dark and forbidding place. He uses many distortions to obtain the answers he needs to promote his view, rather than absorbing critical facts. Although my complaints are numerous, two examples will suffice.In one case, he travels a great length to glorify minivan drivers as "child-friendly" and "savvy bargain hunters". In contrast, he will vilify SUV drivers as "rugged individualists" who care little for common sense the environment. Since the minivan outsells the SUV two to one in Canada but the ratio is reversed in the United States, he concludes that a fundamental difference in values exists between the two countries. However, he carefully ignores the countries' many variables as differing age profiles, women's preference for perceived SUV safety, lower American gas prices and lower disposable Canadian income. Stereotyping and the dependency on a trivial ratio do not build a safe ground for academic research.In another case, he paints Canadians' response to the terror attacks of 9/11 with "feelings of sympathy for and solidarity with the United States". Then he declares that America squandered its neighbor's good will seven months later when four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan were accidentally killed by a U.S, fighter pilot in a friendly-fire incident, only to be followed by a inadequate amount of grief from George W Bush. What Michael Adams conveniently leaves out that Canada's sympathy to its neighbor was evaporating within days of 9/11. Its motley collection of left-wing leaders and commentators, such as Sunera Thobani, Svend Robinson, Maude Barlow and Eric Margolis, were immediately promoting the 'root causes' and 'America is to blame' diatribes in their speeches and columns. The CBC even had its infamous Town Hall Meeting just days after the attacks, where a simple round of questioning immediately degenerated into a heated carnival of U.S.-bashing. A pusillanimous Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, with a keen political eye for embracing these groups, decided to send token and combat-avoiding units to Afghanistan, reinforcing views across Canada that America's pursuits and actions were ignoble from the start.Michael Adams has drawn many conclusions to encourage his viewpoint of two diverging cultures but he should have used some help from a David K Foot or a Paul M Kennedy to salvage his underwhelming arguments.

Very straight forward, and rather boring

Product in very rough shape.