An insightful, troubling look at political resentments in the forgotten heartland.
Wounded feelings give way to nationalist, supremacist politics in Hochschild’s “what went wrong with Appalachia” autopsy.
Appalachia was once a region of union labor activism, progressive social programs, and an openness to working with people from other countries. Most of the region went for Roosevelt—and Carter, and Clinton. But then, sociologist Hochschild writes, something changed: the mines closed down, the small towns died, many of the remaining residents turned to self-medication, and suddenly Appalachia was Trump country. Hochschild traces this turn in part to what she calls the “pride paradox,” by which the satisfaction in hard work well done is replaced by existential despair over losing usefulness and meaning. “People devised various ways to respond: turn shame inward, project shame outward, or find a creative solution to the paradox,” she writes. The middle proposition turns out to have been the most widespread: people in the region, and by extension people in overlooked rural enclaves across the country, now blame others—immigrants, liberals, urban elites—for their woes. This manifests in racism and fascist displays: Hochschild’s opening set piece is a pre-Charlottesville march of white supremacist radicals in a little Kentucky town seething with resentment at being seen by the world as disposable yokels. The real perpetrators, the extractivist multinationals and big pharma moguls, go unquestioned, while Trumpism triumphs because in a psychologically wounded community such as Pikeville, Kentucky, as one counselor notes, “That guy’s selling white nationalism as a quick fix to make a guy who’s down on himself feel like he’s strong and going places.” Hochschild counsels a wide-ranging solution that could use more specific grounding, but that points to a useful direction, involving rebuilding rural America “both by revising the American Dream and by equalizing access to it.”
An insightful, troubling look at political resentments in the forgotten heartland.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781620976463
Page Count: 400
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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