Rainbow Pie is a coming-of-age memoir wrapped around a discussion of America's most taboo subject -- social class. Set between 1950 and 1963, Joe Bageant uses Maw, Pap, Ony Mae, and other members of his rambunctious Scots-Irish family to chronicle the often-heartbreaking post-war journey of 22 million rural Americans into the cities, where they became the foundation of a permanent white underclass.
Combining recollection, stories, accounts, remembrance, and analysis, the book offers an intimate look at what Americans lost in the massive and orchestrated post-war social and economic shift from an agricultural to an urban consumer society. Along the way, he also provides insights into how 'the second and third generation of displaced agrarians', as Gore Vidal described them, now fuel the discontent of America's politically conservative, God-fearing, Obama-hating 'red-staters'.
These are the gun-owning, uninsured, underemployed white tribes inhabiting America's urban and suburban heartland: the ones who never got a slice of the pie during the good times, and the ones hit hardest by America's bad times, and who hit back during election years. Their 'tough work and tougher luck' story stretches over generations, and Bageant tells it here with poignancy, indignation, and tinder-dry wit.
About the Author :
Joe Bageant is a columnist and political commentator who writes for international newspapers and magazines and has appeared on U.S. national public radio and the BBC. He is the author of Deer Hunting with Jesus, which is being developed as a dramatic television series in America.
Review :
"Taken together, Bageant's two books provide salutary, hilarious and at times harrowing reading, with more than a few lessons of caution for Australia. Compassionate and brilliantly written."
--Adelaide Review
"The theme that runs through this memoir and portrait of one aspect of American social life in the postwar years, is the evolution of the white underclass. After World War II, Americans were sold the myth of endless prosperity, when, Joe Bageant maintains, the reality was that more than 20 million migrated from rural America (shrinking the farming population from 44 per cent to 5 per cent) and became the unacknowledged white poor of America. This is their tale, told by one who was there. And it is told with great compassion, in simple, clear prose that has the immediacy of speech...Shades of Studs Terkel."
--The Age
"...we get to hear the voice of the American underclass...Bageant may write like a dream but he hasn't forgotten where he came from...Cutting through the corporatist flim-flam, Bageant describes just what trouble America is in."
--Simon Hughes, Australian Financial Review Magazine
"Equal parts social commentary and evocative memoir, this book exposes the vast and growing inequity between the economic mismanagers and the working poor in the US...Don't presume this is in any way dour soapboxery: Bageant is an effortless humourist. And his reminiscences lead to moments of sheer literary pleasure." FOUR STARS
--Melissa Cranenburgh, Big Issue
"For all of its bitterness, the book is lifted by Bageant's unique and personable voice. Even in the darkest chapters, it retains a folksy charm and an admirably black wit. It's rare for such a downer of a book to make the reader grin so often."
--Courier Mail
"Illuminating and frequently touching...Bageant just wants us to think. To remember. To lift the veil of collective amnesia. To see."
--Stephen Webb, Insights
"Joe Bageant has a wonderful ability to embed hard social, political and economic facts into the warp and weft of stories of homespun characters, close to the earth they plow that speaks thru them.
It's not true that a good book is one you "can't put it down." I put down Rainbow Pie several times -- sometimes even on a page--to savor the language and admire the skyline, and dig deep into the loam of characters, marvel at the panoply of facts marshalled along the way.
Rainbow Pie is touching in the way that Thoreau touches us, in its ideas about place and "abidance," natural and superficial worlds."
--Gary Corseri, Literary scholar, arts critic Salon.com, Counterpunch.com
"Joe Bageant doesn't mince his words in this angry requiem for the dignity of the white US working classes. Subtitled A Memoir Of Redneck America, Rainbow Pie is a terse, provocative book...As the midterm elections approach and a solid proportion of the US "middle class" seems to be gearing up to vote for the sort of lurid right-wingers that baffle even conservative Europeans, Bageant offers some plausible suggestions as to why things have come to this."
--Andrzej Lukowski, Metro
"With humour, compassion and rage, he explores plight of America's white "redneck" underclass." FOUR STARS
--MX
"This is a deeply felt memoir, written by a man who loves his country, is proud of its past and fears for its future. It is intensely readable and more than a little disturbing."
--David Christie, Newcastle Herald
"Bageant is a US social commentator with a unique angle--he was born a redneck, in rural America. Now he is a middle-class intellectual and an acerbic commentator on his beloved land. He became famous with Deer Hunting With Jesus, an analysis of poor, white, conservative Americans that was written with Steinbeck-like compassion and observation. He saw his subjects as victims of rabid capitalism and evangelical religion. Rainbow Pie continues in this vein, a memoir of his family...A powerful book."
--Sunday Age
"[Rainbow Pie is] more an essay on political economy, lavishly illustrated with anecdotes from five generations of his own family, than a life story."
--Sunday Tasmanian
"Most Australians look upon the US with wide-eyed bewilderment. Why do Americans think public healthcare will lead to death panels? How did they ever believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the attack on the World Trade Centre? What craziness leads so many to believe Barack Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim? Why, over and over again, do they appear to fight against their own best interests? If you want answers to these questions then this dissection of the US's "white underclass" is superbly insightful." PICK OF THE WEEK
--Bruce Elder, Sydney Morning Herald
"An amazing read. What Harper Lee had to hide behind fiction to write, Joe Bageant has done straight-up, with all the bones showing. This is a majestic work."
--Bob Kincaid, Head-On Radio Network
