Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War
by Joe Bageant

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.”

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BOOK REVIEW: Deer Hunting With Jesus
by Maxwell George

…One of the slickest things the right ever did was to label necessary social costs as “entitlements.” Through thirty years of repetition, the Republicans have managed to associate the term with laziness in Americans’ minds. To the ear of hardworking blue-collar and service workers, it means “something for nothing.” …The current political narratives are constructed by well-paid public relations professionals. Their job is made easy by the fact that Tom has neither the time nor the experience to deal with political complexity or with anything else other than his job.

…a lifetime pitted against your fellow workers in the gladiatorial theatre of the free market economy…

Sure, the working-class, rural “rednecks” of his hometown are dumb, he claims, but the gravest crime of ignorance is in the middle- and upper-class failure to consider, let alone comprehend, these exploited folks. That understanding is his mission.