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Comment by robbiet480 | Hacker News Reader

Is there as great of a guide as this for the US? I'm an American citizen (by birth) but have many friends that want to move over for work here and I am a horrible explainer.

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It's not exactly a guide about our work culture, but "Xenophobe's Guide to the Americans" does a pretty good job at succinctly describing some of our cultural quirks.

http://www.xenophobes.com/the-americans/

I would like a book, Introduction to American Society. While there are thousands of books addressing some slice or theme, I don't know of a single-volume overview.

That would be a tough book to write. As a (still) English citizen living in the US for 25 years, the thing that amazes me is how varied everything is. It's less homogeneous than anywhere I've lived or visited, taken as a whole. Can you compare SF to Fort Wayne, NY to Toledo or Chicago to Tallahassee in any meaningful way?

Someone on HN previously posted "Which of the 11 American nations do you live in?" And while I don't agree with all of these -- Dallas and Austin are certainly not "Greater Appalachia" and probably deserve some kind of Texas "nation" of their own like "Tidewater" -- it's certainly true that "American Society" has many distinct parts. (Moving from Colorado to Connecticut to Mississippi felt like living abroad in three separate countries.)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/08/wh...

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