From the Publisher
"Fast, funny and often endearing. . . a candid and funny account of growing up in the wrong country and making it right.” — Wall Street Journal
Roger Bennett – a co-host of the “Men in Blazers” show – wrote a memoir filled with silliness, sports, and pop culture. It’s good for a laugh, but it’s also a thoughtful memoir about his love for the US and how to be a beacon of joy in a divided country. — Business Insider
"What makes Reborn in the USA so special is the storytelling: Bennett's hilarious, keenly observed, and deeply moving memoir reminds us that dreams can come true—if not always quite in the way we dreamt them. A wonderful book about coming-of-age in the 1980s, dreaming of a different life, and falling in love with an idea of a place—and then with the place itself." — John Green, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All the Way Down
What's most compelling about this book is the way it shifts the view of how we're supposed to think about the United States. It's a British projection of late 20th century America that's now rejected by most Americans and assumed to be false. Yet what people in American have been conditioned to view as an illusion was wholly genuine to Roger Bennett, and this memoir is a remarkable reminder that perception is not merely a form of historical reality. Perception is all that we have. — Chuck Klosterman, bestselling author of But What If We're Wrong? and Chuck Klosterman X
Reborn in the USA is about a kid who grows up in the North of England, yearning to be an American in all its terrible glory. But it’s really about so much more. Hilariously written from Roger Bennett’s wry and thoughtful perspective, this book is a universal story of growing up and trying to figure out who you are in the world. A time capsule but also a timeless coming of age tale. — Nick Kroll, co-creator of Big Mouth, Netflix
Bennett might be the only writer alive who can weave childhood obsessions with both the Super Bowl-winning Chicago Bears and Tracy Chapman into a singular coming of age story. Reborn in the USA is a poignant, rollicking read, reminding us not only of what it means to pursue the American dream, but what that dream should—and still can—represent. — Mina Kimes, NFL Analyst and Senior Writer, ESPN
“How many worlds can one bloke conquer? When that bloke is a warm hearted, funny, smart and hilarious storyteller named Roger Bennett, the answer seems to be: as many as he wants. This book, part memoir part love letter to his adopted home country of the United States, Reborn in the USA captivated me from first page to last.” — Brian Koppelman, co-creator and showrunner, Billions
“It may not have been your teenage fever dream to leave your dull, rainy hometown in England to move to the land of neon, MTV, and the NFL. But it was Roger Bennett’s, and lucky for us, we get to read about it in hilarious, excruciating, and ultimately uplifting detail in (Re)Born in the USA. A book that celebrates growing up, popular culture, and, the universality of needing to become the person you’re meant to be.” — Nora McInerny, bestselling author of It’s Okay to Laugh (Crying Is Cool Too) and creator of the Terrible, Thanks for Asking podcast
Entertaining... Bennett is good-natured, self-deprecating, and wryly observant throughout… A three-cheers homage to an America that, Bennett suggests, is returning to its open-arms promise of days past. — Kirkus Reviews
Wall Street Journal
"Fast, funny and often endearing. . . a candid and funny account of growing up in the wrong country and making it right.
Chuck Klosterman
What's most compelling about this book is the way it shifts the view of how we're supposed to think about the United States. It's a British projection of late 20th century America that's now rejected by most Americans and assumed to be false. Yet what people in American have been conditioned to view as an illusion was wholly genuine to Roger Bennett, and this memoir is a remarkable reminder that perception is not merely a form of historical reality. Perception is all that we have.
Brian Koppelman
How many worlds can one bloke conquer? When that bloke is a warm hearted, funny, smart and hilarious storyteller named Roger Bennett, the answer seems to be: as many as he wants. This book, part memoir part love letter to his adopted home country of the United States, Reborn in the USA captivated me from first page to last.
Nick Kroll
Reborn in the USA is about a kid who grows up in the North of England, yearning to be an American in all its terrible glory. But it’s really about so much more. Hilariously written from Roger Bennett’s wry and thoughtful perspective, this book is a universal story of growing up and trying to figure out who you are in the world. A time capsule but also a timeless coming of age tale.
John Green
"What makes Reborn in the USA so special is the storytelling: Bennett's hilarious, keenly observed, and deeply moving memoir reminds us that dreams can come true—if not always quite in the way we dreamt them. A wonderful book about coming-of-age in the 1980s, dreaming of a different life, and falling in love with an idea of a place—and then with the place itself."
Nora McInerny
It may not have been your teenage fever dream to leave your dull, rainy hometown in England to move to the land of neon, MTV, and the NFL. But it was Roger Bennett’s, and lucky for us, we get to read about it in hilarious, excruciating, and ultimately uplifting detail in (Re)Born in the USA. A book that celebrates growing up, popular culture, and, the universality of needing to become the person you’re meant to be.”
Mina Kimes
Bennett might be the only writer alive who can weave childhood obsessions with both the Super Bowl-winning Chicago Bears and Tracy Chapman into a singular coming of age story. Reborn in the USA is a poignant, rollicking read, reminding us not only of what it means to pursue the American dream, but what that dream should—and still can—represent.
Business Insider
Roger Bennett – a co-host of the “Men in Blazers” show – wrote a memoir filled with silliness, sports, and pop culture. It’s good for a laugh, but it’s also a thoughtful memoir about his love for the US and how to be a beacon of joy in a divided country.
Wall Street Journal
"Fast, funny and often endearing. . . a candid and funny account of growing up in the wrong country and making it right.
Kirkus Reviews
2021-05-04
A fan’s notes on the beckoning city on the hill, the America of old.
"America existed almost as an alternate planet to me, a place filled with possibility and promise, where life seemed to be lived with a different gravitational pull.” So writes Liverpudlian Bennett, the descendant of a Russian Jew who left home to go to America and mistakenly got off in the U.K. instead—all reason enough for the author to have considered himself, from his earliest years, as “an American trapped in an Englishman’s body.” If his parents and schoolmates were sometimes bemused by his attachment to such emblems of American popular culture asSaturday Night Live, he found encouragement in the teacher he fondly calls “Fat Knacker,” who told tales of an America that welcomed newcomers and promised grand adventures. Most of Bennett’s entertaining memoir takes place in the U.K., though at the end, he finally arrives in the U.S., first in Chicago and then in New York. “For me, the United States has proven to be a land so free, you even allow bald blokes with accents to appear on television,” he writes appreciatively, having logged many hours as the co-host of Men in Blazers, a popular soccer-focused sports show. Bennett is good-natured, self-deprecating, and wryly observant throughout, recounting a disastrous bar mitzvah, feckless romances, teenage infatuations, and suchlike things. He takes a serious turn, though, when he writes about when he finally became an American, a time when the nation was presided over by a racist xenophobe. “The fact I had become a citizen at the very time the United States became so turbulent and chaotic was crushing,” he writes, noting that like so many other immigrants, he had come to the country on a tourist visa and simply stayed on, never having had to cultivate the fear of authorities that so many other would-be Americans have to endure.
A three-cheers homage to an America that, Bennett suggests, is returning to its open-arms promise of days past.
