Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1921372079 ISBN 13: 9781921372070

Synopsis

When Joe Bageant returned to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, he rediscovered his redneck roots - "the great beery, NASCAR-loving, church-going, gun-owning America that has never set foot in a Starbucks". But he soon realised that these were the very people who had carried George W. Bush to victory. This seemed ironic, because Winchester, like countless American small towns, was fast becoming the bedrock of a permanent underclass - a white ghetto of the working poor in which two in five people do not finish high school, nearly everyone over fifty has serious health problems and little or no health care, and credit ratings are virtually nonexistent. What it adds up to, Bageant argues, is an unacknowledged, American class war from which alcohol, overeating, and Jesus are the preferred avenues of escape. Deer Hunting with Jesus is a raucous mix of storytelling and political commentary. By turns brutal, tender, incendiary, and seriously funny, it is a potent antidote to what Bageant dubs 'the American hologram' - the televised, corporatised, virtual reality that distracts us from the insidious realities of American life.

About this title

Review

"Joe Bageant is a brilliant writer. He evokes working class America like no one else. The account of his revisit to his Virginia roots is sobering, poignant, and instructive."
--Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States

"This book is righteous, self-righteous, exhilarating, and aggravating. By God, it's a raging, hilarious, and profane love song to the great American redneck. As a blue state man with a red state childhood, I have been waiting for this book for years. We ignore its message at our peril."
--Sherman Alexie, author of Reservation Blues

"This fine book sheds a devastating light on Bush & Co.'s notorious 'base, ' i.e. America's white working class, whose members have been ravaged by the very party that purports to take their side. Meanwhile, the left has largely turned them out, or even laughed at their predicament. Of their degraded state--and, therefore, ours--Joe Bageant writes like an avenging angel."
--Mark Crispin Miller, author of Fooled Again: The Real Case for Election Reform

"Joe Bageant is the Sartre of Appalachia. His white-hot bourbon-fuelled prose shreds through the lies of our times like a weed-whacker in overdrive. Deer Hunting with Jesus is a deliciously vicious and wickedly funny chronicle of a thinking man's life in God's own backwoods."
--Jeffrey St. Clair, author of Grand Theft Pentagon and co-editor of CounterPunch

"This recounting of lost lives--of white have-nots in one of our most have-not states--has the power of an old-time Scottish Border ballad. It is maddening and provocative that the true believers in 'American exceptionalism' and ersatz machismo side with those stepping all over them. Bageant's writing is as lyrical as Nelson Algren's, and if there's a semblance of hope, it's that he catches on with new readers thanks to the alternative media."
--Studs Terkel

"Deer Hunting with Jesus is one of those rare books that is colorful, depressing, hilarious, and biting all at the same time. Joe Bageant has given us a glimpse into the vicious class war that is too often ignored or hidden by those happily perpetrating this war."
--David Sirota, author of Hostile Takeover

"Dead serious and damn funny...Bageant writes with the ghosts of Hunter S. Thompson, Will Rogers, and Frank Zappa kibitzing over his shoulder...Takes Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas, to the next level. "
--Mother Jones

"Bageant mixes a reporter's keen analysis, a storyteller's color, and a native son's love of his roots in this absorbing dissection of America's working poor...wise, tender, and acerbic."
--Booklist

"Mixing folksy populism with the lacerating fury of Hunter S. Thompson, Bageant's bitingly funny report can at times make Michael Moore seem tame. While Hunting may leave you heartsick, it's hard to turn away."
--Entertainment Weekly

"Informative, infuriating, terrifying, scintillating...Imagine a cross between Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?, Hunter S. Thompson's booze-and-dope-fueled meditations on Nixon's political potency, and C. Wright Mills's understanding of the durability of the power elite."
--The American Prospect

"Hilariously funny, very angry, and somewhat depressing...The one book I read in 2007 that I would like all of you to read."
--Atlanta Journal-Constitution

About the Author

Joe Bageant wrote an online column that made him a cult hero among gonzo-journalism junkies and progressives. He has been interviewed on Air America and comments on America's long history of religious fundamentalism in the BBC/Owl documentary The Vision: Americans on America. He worked as a senior editor for the Primedia History Magazine Group before moving to Belize, where he wrote and sponsored a small development project with the Black Carib families of Hopkins Village. Bageant's other books include: Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir and Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball: The Best of Joe Bageant, a collection of essays published posthumously.

Edition details

• ISBN 10: 1921372079
• ISBN 13: 9781921372070
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English