BuzzFlash Reviews

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Hailed as a successor to "What's the Matter with Kansas" (although by a different author), "Deer Hunting with Jesus" is rapidly rising on the sales charts.

The author, Joe Bageant, returned to his childhood home of Winchester, Virginia. He writes of the working class left behind by both the Republicans and Democrats, but lured into the GOP camp by television demagoguery and the pitting of one dispossessed group against another (just look at the debate over immigration).

Bageant calls his book, "one part cultural anthropology and part splash of cold water into the face of those liberals wondering why their working-class brothers and sisters seem to have turned against them."

The Democrats are afraid to discuss class issues (except for Edwards in the current presidential primary campaign), because the Republicans always brush them back with charges of "creating class conflicts." In the meantime, the GOP uses emotionally divisive issues to exploit America's working class.

"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. Bagaent'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

From Random House:

"A raucous mix of storytelling and political commentary, Deer Hunting with Jesus is Bageant's report on what he learned by coming home. He writes of his childhood friends who work at factory jobs that are constantly on the verge of being outsourced; the mortgage and credit card rackets that saddle the working poor with debt, i.e., 'white trashonomics'; the ubiquitous gun culture and why the left doesn't get it; Scots Irish culture and how it played out in the young life of Lynddie England; and the blinkered 'magical thinking' of the Christian right. (Bageant's brother is a Baptist pastor who casts out demons.) What it adds up to, he asserts, is an unacknowledged class war. 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."

From the Author:

"Inclusiveness and humane populism is the true banner of liberalism and progressives everywhere. Together we cannot be beaten at all, assuming an honest election. So we need to come to care about the guy under your sink with the plumber's butt and the single mom who drives the forklift on the night shift. Once we do that, we will come to understand that they are not our unchangeable adversaries, but merely among the millions of Americans coarsened over the last couple of generations by toil, ignorance, and debt and misled by the worst elements in American politics."

"As Warren Buffet said, the class war is over and the already-rich have won because the other side does not even understand that it is constantly being waged against them."


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