Product Description

This book provides a primer for those seeking actually or vicariously to adjust to Swiss culture and society. It discusses everything Swiss from age and sex discrimination to xenophobia, with a particular focus on questionable Swiss banking and investment practices, including some which would be illegal in the U.S. and U.K. It also provides a travel guide to the cantons of Zürich, the Bernese Alps, Central Switzerland, Graubünden or Grisons, and Wallis or Valais, with especial emphasis on skiing, hiking, and fine dining.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #306863 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 178 pages

Amazon.com Buying Information, June 6, 2000: Review by Rita Kasper, wife of a Swiss dealer in kitchen furniture.
A satiric jewel of a memoir that captures the beauty and peacefulness of Switzerland as well as the glacial stolidity of many of its inhabitants.

Amazon.com Buying Information: June 6, 2000 review by Dr. Vollrat Von Deichmann, a professor of forestry who taught at Arizona State University.
This witty author has a strong background in Latin and a large English vocabulary. I learned much about places in Switzerland which I thought I had known.

From the Author
Switzerland is notorious for being 'ein verschlossenes Volk,' a closed society. You can live here for twenty years and still feel like an observer or a tourist rather than a participant. Often you will be made to feel that you do not exist or are invisible, like a little boy standing at the edge of a schoolyard watching the trams back up and turn around at the end of the line while a few yards away his classmates play a boisterous game of 'baseball' with a tennis ball, oblivious to his feelings of rejection upon not being chosen for either team. If only he had been the one child who remembered to bring a ball to school that day! He would keep it in his pocket until the end of the recess and then take it out and bounce it ostentatiously to show the others that it is he who rejects them. But in Switzerland it is never your ball or your field. As Paul Erdman notes in his book 'The Swiss Account' it is impossible to get close to the Swiss - especially when they deliberately speak their local dialect rapidly so that you cannot understand what they are saying. Do not expect to be invited to socialize with colleagues or, if you chance upon them in a social context, to be introduced to their spouses. In eight years of living here I have been invited to Swiss homes only three or four times.

Customer Reviews

Definitely not a whitewash
Are you considering a job offer in Switzerland? This work provides fair warning about the obstacles that you and your spouse will face as an immigrant: a chauvinistic, closed society of incomprehensible, dialect-speaking burghers obsessed with money and reluctant to trust foreigners even after years of acquaintanceship; high rents and prices for inferior food -- especially beef and chicken -- clothing, and automobiles; undisguised resentment that you are denying a job opportunity to a Swiss citizen; discrimination in career advancement and promotion. Most expatriates leave after a year in order to preserve their marriages. Take these caveats to heart before succumbing to the temptations of Alpine skiing and clean, fresh-water swimming. And read this book before deciding whether to accept the job offer.

An honest, unsparing, accurate assessment of the Swiss
This work touches a sensitive nerve for Swiss readers like myself, because it captures the natives' xenophobia, chauvinism, insularity, fear of assimilation by their German neighbors to the north, and general feelings of inferiority and prejudice. The Swiss are not known for great works of art or music or for educational accomplishments outside the fields of medicine and biochemistry/pharmacology or for feminism or even sensitivity to women, and so a book by an American author that pokes fun at these deficiencies serves only to aggravate its subjects' phobias. The surprising popularity of this work in Switzerland should be taken as testimony to this volume's trenchant effectiveness.

A jewel of a memoir which captures Swiss beauty and peace
A jewel of a memoir which captures the beauty and peacefulness of Switzerland as well as the glacial stolidity of its inhabitants. A perceptive if irreverent account of everything Swiss from age and sex discrimination to xenophobia, articulately written in a spirit of satire with wit, humor, and a tincture of scholarship by a highly educated American. Provides a travel guide, with especial emphasis on skiing, hiking, and fine dining. Discusses questionable Swiss investment practices, including some that would be illegal in the U.S., as well as religious prejudices and educational deficiencies of Swiss banking and investment professionals.