Ugly American

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W. W. Norton & Company, Jan 5, 1999 - Fiction - 285 pages
The multi-million-copy bestseller that coined the phrase for tragic American blunders abroad.

In the episode that lends the book its title, the "ugly American" is Homer Atkins, a plain and plain-spoken man, who has been sent by the U.S. government to advise the Southeast Asian country of Sarkhan on engineering projects. When Atkins finds badly misplaced priorities and bluntly challenges the entrenched interests, he lays bare a foreign policy gone dangerously wrong.

First published in 1958, The Ugly American became a runaway national bestseller for its slashing exposé of American arrogance, incompetence, and corruption in Southeast Asia. In linked stories and vignettes, the book uses gripping storytelling to draw a devastating picture of how the United States was losing the struggle with Communism in Asia.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Lucky Lucky Lou 1
11
Lucky Lucky Lou 2
33
Nine Friends
43
Everybody Loves Joe Bing
66
Confidential and Personal
74
Employment Opportunities Abroad
77
The Girl Who Got Recruited
83
The Ambassador and the Working Press
87
What Would You Do If You Were President?
144
How to Buy an American Junior Grade
155
The SixFoot Swami from Savannah
174
Captain Boning USN
191
The Ugly American
205
The Ugly American and the Ugly Sarkhanese
214
The Bent Backs of Chang Dong
232
Senator Sir
239

Everyone Has Ears
93
The Ragtime Kid
110
The Iron of War
115
The Lessons of War
132
The Sum of Tiny Things
264
A Factual Epilogue
271
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About the author (1999)

Eugene Burdick was a political scientist and author of The Ugly American, Fail-Safe, and other books.

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