July 25, 2017

As I read “The Lies They Tell,” Tuvia Tenenbom’s account of his visiting some 28 of the 50 United States over the course of about a year, I found myself thinking of two disparate classics of pop culture..

The first is Simon and Garfunkel’s classic “America“, a song about a road trip to find the real America.

The other is Columbo, the character played by the late Peter Falk, whose rumpled, seemingly distracted and always underestimated detective always gets to the bottom of the crime.

Tenenbom is Columbo, and he unearths a much more cynical take on Americans than Paul Simon’s summary of them being “empty and aching.”

As he did in his book “Catch the Jew” Tenenbom travels through a country – this time, the United States – and talks to everyone who catches his fancy to better understand what America is all about.

The results aren’t pretty.

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