First non-fiction book to get on the list this year (may be the last too for all I know). The full title is Fire and Ice: The United States Canada and the Myth of Converging Values and its all about what the full title describes.
Written by a social economist, the book is a report of thousands of surveys of both Canadians and Americans over the last decade. The surveys rated respondents on social values scales like violence, religiousity, independence, idealism and survivalism. It is probably the most interesting and well written book of statistics I have ever seen.
Adams doesn't pull any punches when it comes to pointing out the negative values that emerge from the surveys, something that seemed to irritate many of his conservative reviewers, but this book explains in clear language what I have intuitively felt and failed to be able to express since arriving here. His injection of humor into what could be a dry analysis of how Canadians and Americans aren't becoming more alike makes this a very easy to read book.
My favorite quote from the text: “…we Canadians sometimes find our neighbours baffling. Between their rhetoric and our own (the left’s admonitions about the dangers of convergence with the gun-toting free marketers to the south, the right’s insistence that we shed our outdated national differences like garments on a long-awaited wedding night and join our industrious, innovative Yankee friends in an orgy of free trade and economic growth), Americans are reflected in so many funhouse mirrors that it would be remarkable if we saw them, collectively, as anything other than caricatures” (20).
What was really interesting for me, coming from Alberta to New England was the way in which the entire U.S. is far more conservative than the whole of Canada (generally speaking of course). Even liberal New England (the most liberal of the seven 'sections' of the U.S.) was more conservative than Alberta (the most conservative 'section' of Canada).
In some ways, this feels like a vindication of sorts. At least I know I'm not wacko or just overly sensitive, my sense of the difference between these two places follows what these statisticians have found out.