A beguiling account of twentieth-century America through the eyes of an outsider, a remarkable inversion of the standard 'Westerner observing the exotic' travel writing formula. Wu Tingfang wrote this book at an intriguing juncture in history - aeroplanes and motion pictures had recently been invented, and while he did not know it, a tremendous cultural shift was about to take place in the West due to the First World War. His observations are enlightening and remain as relevant today as the era in which they were written.