Review by Choice Review
Historian Isenberg's voluminous, extremely readable book is enormous in scope and sharp in focus. Her argument is grounded in the idea of a mythology of poor whiteness. In her book's early sections, Isenberg uses figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Jackson, along with popular icons from Davy Crockett to Elvis Presley, to explore how poor whiteness was constructed (concepts such as the "cracker" and the namesake "white trash") and poor whites consequently treated--politically, socially, and culturally. Though the book's scope is significant, it is also narrow. Primarily focusing on the South, Isenberg (Louisiana State Univ.), perhaps by necessity, largely omits the "white" (in contemporary concept more than America's, historically) immigrant ghettos of the Northeast Corridor. The intersections of class with non-whiteness, or the ways in which class status might foster and encourage racism in some eras, is only a small part of her puzzle. Courses that might use this book as a primary text (perhaps a semester's exploration of class in US history) will certainly need to supplement with others to explore the multifarious nature of class and poverty in the US. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. --Jennifer L Cote, University of Saint Joseph
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE VOS, by Dominic Smith. (Picador, $16.) A 17th-century Dutch painting and a forgery of it kick off a highbrow mystery. After the painting is stolen from Marty de Groot, whose family had owned it for generations, Marty's streak of bad luck comes to an end. Years later, the hidden commonalities between him, the artist - the only female painter in a Dutch guild at the time - and the painting's forger come into full view. WHITE TRASH: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg. (Penguin, $17.) This masterly cultural history traces the United States' changing relationship to white poverty - from Britain's desire to banish its undesirable citizens to North America, to the stigmas and epithets attached to the underclass, to racial anxieties about becoming a "mongrel" nation. EVERYONE BRAVE IS FORGIVEN, by Chris Cleave. (Simon & Schuster, $16.) In 1939 London, Mary North is given a teaching job just as the city's students are evacuated, leaving behind only those who are mentally impaired, disabled or black. Cleave drew upon his grandparents' correspondence for his novel, which our reviewer, Michael Callahan, praised for its "ability to stay small and quiet against the raging tableau of war." OPERATION THUNDERBOLT: Flight 139 and the Raid on Entebbe Airport, the Most Audacious Hostage Rescue Mission in History, by Saul David. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $18.99.) In 1976, hijackers forced the pilot of an Air France flight en route from Tel Aviv to Paris to land in Entebbe, Uganda, and took the plane's passengers hostage. David recounts the episode in thrilling, minute-by-minute detail, with attention to the masterminds behind the hijacking and the Israeli government's decision to carry out the dangerous rescue mission. THE SUN IN YOUR EYES, by Deborah Shapiro. (Morrow/HarperCollins, $14.99.) It's been 10 years since Viv and Lee, the daughter of a musician who died when she was a child, lived together in college, and nearly three since Lee all but dropped from view. But when she suddenly appears, asking Viv to join her on a quest to recover her father's unfinished album, the trip offers both women a chance at closure. THE RETURN: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between, by Hisham Matar. (Random House, $17.) Matar's father, a prominent Libyan dissident, disappeared into a notorious regime prison in 1990; his fate remains unknown. This memoir, one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2016, examines the grief of a family left in the dark, with meditations on dictatorship and art's capacity to console.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 9, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
Most people are well aware of what terms are not acceptable when talking about different races or ethnicities. But what about terms denoting class? Isenberg takes a close look at the history of poor whites in America and asks readers why it is seemingly acceptable to use such terms as white trash, crackers, and rednecks to describe this group of people. The narrative goes back to pre-colonial times, when Great Britain realized America could function as one giant workhouse. Poor indentured servants were sent overseas in droves, with the hope that a life of hard work would train their offspring to be better members of society. Benjamin Franklin continued this train of thought, believing that idleness could be bred out of people. Somewhere along the way, though, not everyone got the memo, and the stigma of coming from white trash still exists American exceptionalism be damned. Turning to the present day, Isenberg covers everything from Bill Clinton to country-boy culture to the rise of redneck reality TV. The history here can sometimes be dense, but the author delivers a thought-provoking discourse on an important social issue.--Vnuk, Rebecca Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Isenberg tackles a topic rarely addressed by mainstream American writing on race and class as she skillfully demonstrates that "class defines how real people live." Isenberg highlights how social power brokers (including politicians, lawmakers, psychiatrists, and sociologists, writers of newspaper and literature) play a role in defining and reinforcing class in America. Actress Potter reads this complicated text with the solemnity and respect Isenberg's prose deserves. In particular, Potter proves a master of emphasis, moving through each sentence and balancing the need to move forward with the need to vocally capture the sentence's meaning. Her voice has a low but soft quality to it that makes it enjoyable to listen to, while her ability to strike meaning into each sentence keeps listeners engaged through this fascinating history. A Viking hardcover. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Isenberg (Fallen Founder) sets out to find the lower classes that, over time, have been variously cast as degraded, despoiled, and even demented. In doing so, the author argues that their presence and persistence counters the promise of American progress, for it suggests that class was, and is, more resilient than the American Dream would have it. Failing populist moments, the white "trash" remained disfranchised and dismissed, or feared for their supposed debilitating effects on morality. Isenberg takes the long view, from the convicts that the British transported to the colonies to segregationists, "trailer trash," the friendly yokelism and folk "wisdom" of The Beverly Hillbillies and The Andy Griffith Show and now Duck Dynasty. The author largely identifies "white trash" as a Southern phenomenon (the urban poor are not part of the society surveyed) but provides an astonishingly wide and copious canvas by describing the ways "white trash" appeared or were seen as individuals of concern in popular culture, political rhetoric, scientific theories, pseudoscientific policies, and literature. The narrative incorporates people as varied as Lyndon B. Johnson, Harper Lee, and Tammy Faye Bakker to show that the exceptions to the supposed American exceptionalism were, and are, its fundamental fact and foil. VERDICT Essential reading for a new perspective on the role of class in American society.-Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A rigorously researched study of the entrenched system of racial classification that dispels many myths about American national identity.In this impressive work of social history, Isenberg (American History/Louisiana State Univ.; Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr, 2007, etc.) challenges head-on America's "fable of class denial." From the first indentured servants brought to Plymouth and Jamestown to the caricatured hillbillies of Duck Dynasty, the existence of "waste" people, or impoverished, ignorant, landless whites, has persistently run against convenient notions of the upstanding American founderi.e., moral, hardworking "entrepreneurial stewards of the exploitable land." Dumped on the Colonies, the vagrant, often criminal poor from England and elsewhere were considered expendable and often exploited. As a key to the story, Isenberg looks at the early settlement of North Carolina, which became a "renegade territory, a swampy refuge for the poor and landless," situated between elite Virginians and slaveholding "upstart" South Carolinians. Contrary to the mythmaking of the exceptional early American in writings by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson, based on theories of "good breeding" and yeomanry, a whole class of common people grew up as a byproduct of the slaveholding states, living on the margins of the plantations: dirt-poor Southerners (literally "clay-eaters") who were considered lazy and racially degenerate. Moreover, the enormous new swaths of Western land were largely populated by a new class of "squatters" or "crackers," considered "mangy varmints infesting the land" and represented by the first Westerner elected president, Andrew Jackson. Isenberg examines some surprising sources of these early stereotypes of white trash, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), in which the author "described poor whites as a degenerate class, prone to crime, immorality, and ignorance." From the eugenics movement to the rise of the proud redneck, Isenberg portrays a very real and significant history of class privilege in the United States. A riveting thesis supported by staggering research. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
