- Published: 05/12/2013
- ISBN: 9781846275593
- Granta Books
- 288 pages
Deer Hunting With Jesus
Joe Bageant
Welcome to Winchester, Virginia: a town populated almost entirely by the undereducated, the overweight and the dirt-poor. Patsy Cline may have been born here, but she got out pretty fast – for most of the inhabitants, life is a constant, unwinnable scrabble over mortgage repayments, loan debts and healthcare bills, and the only avenues of escape are a tour of duty in Iraq, alcohol, overeating or God. Joe Bageant knows these people well because he is one of them, and in this riveting journey around the factories, the rifle ranges, the bars and the lots of his hometown, he shows us how white working-class Americans have been exploited and betrayed by the very people – in Big Business and in the Republican government – they put their faith in. These people are not stupid white men (and women), but they are misled.
£8.99
A gonzo rip through Virginia that challenges liberals to court the Jesus-loving, Bud-drinking poor ... A good read
Esquire
With the lacerating fury of Hunter S. Thompson, Bageant's bitingly funny report can at times make Michael Moore seem tame
Entertainment Weekly
[Deer Hunting with Jesus] succeeds on righteous anger, and Bageant is surely correct in arguing that the Republicans have captured the white working class because the Democrats no longer speak for them ... Deer Hunting with Jesus speaks form the heart
Safraz Manzoor, Observer
From the Same Author
Rainbow Pie
Joe Bageant
While Obama’s triumphant ‘Yes we can’ continued to reverberate, it was tempting to believe that a new era of opportunity had dawned. But for several million dirt-poor, disgruntled Americans the possibility of change is as far away as ever. These are the gun-owning, donut dunkin’, uninsured, underemployed rednecks who occupy America’s heartland: the ones who never got a slice of the pie during the good times, and the ones who have been hit hardest by the economic slump. Theirs is a hard-luck story that goes back generations and Joe Bageant tells it here with poignancy, indignation, and tinder-dry wit. Through the tale of his own rambunctious Scots-Irish family, starting with his grandparents Maw and Pap, Bageant traces the post-war migration of the rural poor to the sprawling suburbs where they found, not the affluence they’d dreamed of, but isolation and deprivation, and the bitter futility of hope. What do the white working poor of America want, and what does America want for them?
