|
| Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War | 
 enlarge | Author: Joe Bageant
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
Buy New: $8.15
You Save: $5.80 (42%)
New (31) Used (5) from $7.70
Avg. Customer Rating:  84 reviews
Sales Rank: 3677
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 5.4 x 3.5 x 0.7
ISBN: 0307339378
Dewey Decimal Number: 320
EAN: 9780307339379
ASIN: 0307339378
Publication Date: June 24, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: B20081006210455T
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
A raucous, truth-telling look at the white working poor-and why they hate liberalism.
Deer Hunting with Jesus is web columnist Joe Bageant’s report on what he learned when he moved back to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, which-like countless American small towns-is fast becoming the bedrock of a permanent underclass. By turns brutal, tender, incendiary, and seriously funny, this book is a call to arms for fellow progressives with little real understanding of "the great beery, NASCAR-loving, church-going, gun-owning America that has never set foot in a Starbucks."
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 79 more reviews...
 Frightening in its Implications June 30, 2007
131 out of 137 found this review helpful
As a progressive who grew up in exactly the kind of town the author describes, I found "Deer Hunting With Jesus" to be a chilling and dead on accurate account of modern day America. Unless you've had the experience of seeing the house you grew up in only 20 years ago boarded up and sold at a HUD auction, or turned into a crack house as my best friend from high school's house recently was (we were solidly middle class by small town standards), you really can't appreciate what the author is trying to describe.
That said, this is no biased political rant, as the author's staunch defense of gun ownership demonstrates. It is instead a desperate warning to all Americans just how perilously close we are to seeing our way of life destroyed by our own misguided collective actions. The author believes that progressives and the white working class (rednecks as he calls them) ought to be able to find political common ground based upon economic interest. He's also realistic enough to realize that it is unlikely to happen in time to rescue America from the precipice we seemed so determined to fling ourselves over.
Be forewarned, it is depressing as hell and in no way conforms to the Republican OR Democratic narratives of what America needs to do to preserve our way of life. It is the kind of truth-telling book that could only be written by someone who has seen enough of living on both sides of the red-blue divide to truly understand what ails this country.
In all, a perfect antidote to what the author calls the "American Hologram" of our mass media culture.
Highly recommended June 26, 2007
110 out of 119 found this review helpful
I am a native of Winchester, VA, Bageant's hometown that is also the focus of this book. It was interesting to read about the dark underbelly of the town in which I grew up. My sense is that Bageant's facts are mostly correct, even though his assessment is quite obviously one-sided.
I give this book a solid five stars and highly recommend it to any reader regardless of their politics. It was a very entertaining read and I found it to be more informative about how the working class lives than either "Nickel and Dimed" or "What's the Matter with Kansas?". Those were good books, but they never escape the "outsider" perspective. The authors of most books on working class America are like scientists looking at some bizarre pathogen through a microscope; Bageant doesn't approach working class people as specimens to be studied, he actually sits down and talks (a lot) and drinks (a whole lot) with them.
The reader should keep in mind Bageant's perspective and remember that Winchester is not all bad. I graduated from the city high school (Handley) in 1996 and it seemed like any student who was reasonably intelligent and hard-working had a good future; however, the problem emerges when you look at where students get such habits - usually from peers and family members. That's why Bageant's description of the culture of the poor is so important regardless of whether or not you agree with his politics (I most emphatically do not). Conservatives and libertarians should find this useful because it exposes why some behave so irresponsibly.
This is by far the best political commentary I have read this year. Highly recommended and a quick and easy (but very intelligent and witty) read.
Biting but convincing book about the working class in America June 19, 2007
59 out of 65 found this review helpful
This books has moments of sharp-edge humor, but overall it paints a very bleak picture of the working class of our country. Whereas the "average Joe" in his Virginia hometown used to be able to afford his own home and enjoy something akin to the "American dream," Joe Bageant returns 30 years later to find a world bereft of hope...a place populated by folks who relentlessly pursue a dream that they will never see come true.
I find Bageant's points well-taken and convincing, and it did open my eyes up to a few things I had never considered. I recommend it, not for it's sharply humorous thrust, but for the important observations he makes.
A Blue (but Escaped Red) American Writes with Feeling about Red America July 27, 2007
41 out of 42 found this review helpful
Let me begin by saying that, as an escapee in 1974 from Red State Indiana to Bluest of Blue New York City where I discovered my own liberal bona fides, I hope every New Yawker, Bostonian, Connecticut Yankee, San Franciscan, Portlander (OR), and Seattlean reads Joe Bageant's DEER HUNTING WITH JESUS. Along with every East and West Coast Democratic Congressman, Senator, and Presidential aspirant. Why? Understanding a different country within our country, developing a modicum of identification or at least empathy, developing and further promoting national policies to address the societal needs of working class America, and (if for no other reason) increasing the chances of re-establishing and maintaining Democratic control of Congress, the White House, and someday the Supreme Court.
Bageant is not some liberal academician who just helicoptered in Margaret Mead-like for a brief, notebook-in-hand stay with the indigenous peoples of Winchester, Virginia. Rather, DEER HUNTING WITH JESUS describes the author's return to live in his hometown after a thirty-year absence in such far-flung left wing havens as Boulder, CO , Eugene, OR, and the Coeur d'Alene (ID) Indian Reservation. What he discovers is a town far different than the one of his boyhood, a place where "average folks" are uneducated, hopelessly parochial and uninformed, terrified of getting sick, and anesthetized by materialism, religious fundamentalism, and eight hours a day of television. They spend most of their lives resentful of "elites" and the rich, but resigned to their lot, all the while living on an economic precipice.
In each chapter, Bageant tackles one aspect of rural, working class life: Republicanism, debt and bankruptcy, gun ownership, religion, allegiance to the military and military ideals, health care, and education and the American lifestyle as delivered by Wal-mart and the mass media. In almost every instance, however, the author combines exposition and revealing statistics with highly personal accounts based on the lives of Winchester's citizenry. From the first pages at the Royal Lunch to the book's closing back there again, Bageant tells his story through the townspeople. We meet Dink Lamp and Pootie, the karaoke-loving Dottie, local rich guy Bobby Fulk, Woody McCauley and his wife Ruth, Tommy Ray, longtime friend Tom Henderson, old high school flame and Rubbermaid factory worker Carolyn, and Joe's demon-exorcising, Baptist pastor brother, Mike. In his one major diversion out of Winchester to the nearby town of Fort Ashby (WV), Bageant relates the fascinating story of that town's native daughter and serial Abu Gharib abuser, Lynndie England. Some of their stories are illustrative, while others are stunning in their subject's naivete and a few are simply heartbreaking. Bageant tells their stories, especially those of Dottie and Ruth, with a touching tenderness and humanity, and without a trace of condescension. In the end, most of Winchester's working class are simply economic victims of the broader American society, most fooled by corporations, government leaders, and the media into believing they are living the average Joe's American Dream.
Of course, Bageant's imposed reality on these individuals tells the real tale, the one few if any in Winchester comprehend. Working class America is grossly undereducated and overfed, hypnotized to near catatonia by television and right wing talk radio, underpaid but duped into believing that unions will only worsen their plight, and lacking in health care and retirement benefits. The lives of many of the people in DEER HUNTING WITH JESUS will ultimately be dictated by events and forces outside their control and understanding. Yet they march along in political lockstep, conservative Republican to the core without knowing why, responding with emotion rather than reason to religious and political appeals designed for just that purpose.
Similar to books like Ehrenreich's NICKEL AND DIMED or the New York Times's series compendium CLASS MATTERS, Joe Bageant gets truly up close and personal with small town, working class, Blue State America. Instead of Thomas Frank's intriguing but more academic WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS?, we get a microcosmic, small town equivalent - a sort of "What's the Matter with Winchester, Virginia?" The difference in Bageant's book (from Ehrenreich's and the Times's), however, is that his agenda is overtly and in your face political, yet done with humor and a genuine feeling of care and concern for the townsfolk who populate his writing. Hopefully, this book will also provide (liberal) Democrats with increased insight on how to finally begin reaching a large segment of the American population. Bageant makes it clear that improved education, a livable minimum wage, and access to affordable health care would be good places to start.
 pretentious, smug drivel February 10, 2008
36 out of 61 found this review helpful
My social group and myself consider ourselves progressives, so I thought this book would be worthwhile, although the cynical title implied that this book would deliver more style than substance. What I got, however, was pretentious drivel written by one of the many insufferable baby boomers who, in addition to having no concept of sustainability - environmental, economic, or otherwise - continue to subject us with their bad ideas and philosophies that, under their leadership, will leave the world a much worse off place for me and my children. In this book, the author manages to:
*Criticize evangelicals for believing that the Biblical character David is real despite evidence to the contrary (which I agree). But then operates under the assumption that those whose education does not go beyond high school are more likely to vote Republican. Actually, 69% of people who did not finish high school in the 2004 presidential election voted for Kerry, 57% of those with Bachelor's voted for Bush, and 59% of those with advanced degrees voted for Kerry (according to the U.S. Census and Univ. of Michigan National Election Studies Center). Criticizing one group for an action while simultaneously doing the same thing yourself has a word.
*Labels two-year colleges as "anti-intellectual," but yet projects Harvard as bastian of progressivism and intellectualism, asserting that evangelical philosophy will never find room there (it doesn't at two-year colleges either). If the author based his assertions on facts, not anecdote, emotions, or uninformed assumptions, he would realize that the colleges in Madison, Berkeley, New Haven, and Cambridge, do a much better job of educating and serving the needs of the corporate (through research grants) and individual super-rich elite than they do about getting rid of intergenerational inequality. These institutions receive billions in public tax dollars (even Harvard and Yale do through research and financial aid), and enroll only a tiny number of first-generation and low-income students. You don't have to be smart to go to Harvard; you just have to be rich.
*Glorifies the past (1960's) just as well as any conservative does (anytime before the 1960's). Does the author realize that in the 1960's another generation was in charge and now that baby boomers (who cut their teeth in the 1960's) are in charge and in a position to do something about it, educational equality, according to the author, has gotten worse?
*Offers over 250 pages of complaints with only a vague paragraph about solutions - "more education," I think. Remarkably, the author asserts that education is one key to the problem, but then criticizes the only postsecondary sector (two-year colleges) that is actually doing anything meaningful about increasing access and enhancing equity.
These are only a few of the many problems with this book. Overgeneralizing a giant issue (class war), providing no historical context, providing very little to no evidence to back up claims, and complaining without offering solutions might have been a strategy in the 1960's, but today there are more effective strategies, like when presenting an idea or thesis "ideas based on evidence" and "solutions." Skip this book and read anything by Zinn, Chomsky, or for a much better alternative to this book, David Shipler's The Working Poor.
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
