An American stuck in his native England.īennett gives voice to every teenager who longs to leave their hometown behind, who pines for a different life, and who will do just about anything to escape what makes their formative years awful. Bennett was happiest when playing chess with his grandfather, watching The Love Boat and Miami Vice, reading his hoarded copies of Rolling Stone, and blasting John Mellencamp’s Scarecrow, Public Enemy’s Yo! Bum Rush the Show, or Tracy Chapman’s debut Fast Car. (Re)Born in the USA is Roger Bennett’s homage to an adolescence as a triple outsider (Jewish in largely Catholic Liverpool, middle class in an overwhelmingly working-class community, and obsessed with American culture while his peers tended towards more deviant, borderline hooligan, behavior.) Throw in the fact that his father was a judge who campaigned on behalf of Margaret Thatcher in a town who thought of her as Medusa-the perfect recipe for ostracism. That is the kind of story you manufacture about yourself when you grow up in a place like Liverpool in the 1980’s.
One of the earliest beliefs that I still cling onto in life, is that I was born a American trapped in an Englishman’s body. A memoir for fans of Jon Ronson and Chuck Klosterman, but with Roger Bennett’s signature pop culture flair and humor. One-half of the celebrated Men in Blazers duo, longtime culture and soccer commentator Roger Bennett traces the origins of his love affair with America, and how he went from a depraved, pimply faced Jewish boy in 1980’s Liverpool to become the quintessential Englishman in New York.
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