The Golden Door takes its title from Emma Lazarus’ poignant poem, inscribed at the feet of the Statue of Liberty, read by every American schoolchild. The sonnet famously articulates the American dream of creating a haven for the world’s beleaguered, exhausted and oppressed, rejecting the ‘storied pomp’ and values of more ‘ancient lands’. In this passionate defence of America, both what she is and what she represents, Britain’s most famous restaurant critic and columnist A.A. Gill takes on European snobbery and disparagement of the American Dream and exposes the clichés and default prejudices which perpetuate it. Grappling with the ways in which the world’s perception of America changed between those two generation-defining moments, the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, and the devastation of the twin towers in New York City on 11 September 2001, the book is as much about the things which Gill himself has always found likeable about the United States and its citizens. Clearly coming from a deeply personal place, these essays are very much about the disjunction between Gill’s expectations of a land of simpletons formed before he lived in the States, and the contradictory, elusive country and personal happiness he found whilst living both in New York and in the Kentucky mountains.Gill points out the hypocrisy of non-Americans attacking various facets of American politics or lifestyle whilst voraciously consuming her produce, whether in the form of dream, cinema or other commercial goods, and asks how exactly it came to happen that the optimistic promise of the 1970s America he knew and loved came to represent everything which the rest of the world’s liberal intellectuals set their opinions. The book is structured as a collection of linked essays based around specific places, each of which is “the home of” something, according to the famous boast of so many small town Welcome signs in America, be it a mountain, a mine, spotted pigs, a president, the world`s biggest ball of string or deepest hole. This is a journey on which Gill explores and deconstructs the mythologies America has spun about herself and those spun about her, and shows how these, taken together, make America, the home of everything.