Deer Hunting with Jesus

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Much more interesting than I expected - Rated
I would never have considered myself a redneck or to have any redneck values - until I read this book and, with some horror, I realised that there is redneck in all of us. It's deeply unsettling to discover that there is logic and reason (didn't say it was good....) behind the classic redneck image and how little is being done to combat it - in fact quite the reverse.

Read it but be prepared to have your self-perception changed forever.

Depressing reading - Rated
This didn't promise to be a "fun" read but I must admit after reading about a third of it I felt an overwhelming weariness with it. In the end I didnt finish it. It's possible I missed the point.

Interesting in parts, ultimately fails to convince - Rated
This is an odd book: at once interesting and readable (apart from the dull chapter on guns) but equally frustrating and, ultimately, unconvincing. As an insight into a side of American life which outsiders rarely see, it fascinates and appalls in equal measure. It has important things to say about guns and their place in parts of American culture (which is particularly interesting to a European, inclined only to see one side of the gun control debate) and was clearly prescient about irresponsible lending to people unable to sustain huge debts.

However, it is let down by an author whose conviction not only of his own rightness but of everyone else's wrongness becomes tedious. Ironcially, by the end of the book Bageant has become like the charismatic preachers he scrutinises: he's a man with tunnel vision and some converting to do. Fair enough, this is polemic; but I find it difficult to believe that Joe alone has seen the light while all of the people in Winchester and the other places he writes about are unthinkingly accepting of a Government/Church line. In presenting his countrymen as done-down dupes Joe is surely becoming what he purports to despise, namely the educated outsider who sees the little people as a homogeneous mass to be manipulated and cajoled.

The other side of Kansas - Rated
This is a very interesting read. I have read many Thomas Frank books (What's the Matter with Kansas? etc.) and I've enjoyed them; they've helped me understand some of the ideological and intellectual underpinnings of the American right.

Similarly, I have read and enjoyed Selling Your Father's Bones: The Epic Fate of the American West which gives an insight into the history of the development of the American West and the 'red necks' who pushed out the indigenous inhabitants.

Couple these with God's Own Country by Stephen Bates (religious correspondent of the Guardian) and I thought maybe I knew something about what was going on in the Red States. But this book makes it real.

Bageant mixes anecdote and statistic to give a real feel for what it means to be poor and to vote Republican, to explain why guns are such an emotive issue (and why Bowling For Columbine gets nowhere close), why outsourcing is feared but unions rejected, and why religion is so central.

Bageant manages to get Pat Robertson and Ian Paisley into the same sentence, linking present day religious fundamentalism to the original Scots Irish settlers, suggesting direct links between the respective ideologies. And he tells the tale of Lynddie England, the woman who posed for photos standing on the bodies of tortured Iraqis.

Bageant was born and raised in Virginia. He only gained a different perspective because the Vietnam war gave him an opportunity to get out and he took it. A friend of his offered a similar 'escape' became a heroin addict before being 'born again' and returning to Virginia.

In a readable, intelligent and well-informed style, Bageant portrays a side of America that you very, very rarely see. The only time I can think of anything that came close was The Deer Hunter. But that did not have Bageant's humour and humanity.

If you're interested in the issues raised by writers such as Thomas Frank and Kevin Phillips (see American Theocracy), then this is definitely worth a read.