Mateo's review
Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War
by Joe Bageant
Mateo's review
Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War by Joe Bageant
Mateo's review
rating:
Not a bad book, but a disappointing one. Disappointing when compared with, for example, Thomas Frank's excellent What's the Matter with Kansas?, another son-of-a-red-state writer's rueful look at how corporate neocons have hijacked the minds and hearts of rural America.
There's some good stuff here--Bageant writes well and is funny, and he has an interesting perspective, that of a liberal who goes home to his redneck roots. When he sticks to cases, he can be very informative--he provides perhaps the best explanation of how supposedly "non-profit" hospitals screw their patients and their community I've read, for example. In some ways he's like an embedded reporter in his own town, and he presents his people, not without sympathy, in a way that most of us in the big coastal cities will never know them. His final essay, "American Hologram," is a masterful philippic about how America has been stolen away from the sleepwalking, TV-drugged citizenry.
Bu...more
There's some good stuff here--Bageant writes well and is funny, and he has an interesting perspective, that of a liberal who goes home to his redneck roots. When he sticks to cases, he can be very informative--he provides perhaps the best explanation of how supposedly "non-profit" hospitals screw their patients and their community I've read, for example. In some ways he's like an embedded reporter in his own town, and he presents his people, not without sympathy, in a way that most of us in the big coastal cities will never know them. His final essay, "American Hologram," is a masterful philippic about how America has been stolen away from the sleepwalking, TV-drugged citizenry.
Bu...more
