Rainbow Pie. A Memoir of Redneck America

While Obama's triumphant 'Yes we can' continued to reverberate, it was

tempting to believe that a new era of opportunity had dawned. But for

several million dirt-poor, disgruntled Americans the possibility of

change is as far away as ever. These are the gun-owning, donut dunkin',

uninsured, underemployed rednecks who occupy America's heartland: the

ones who never got a slice of the pie during the good times, and the

ones who have been hit hardest by the economic slump. Theirs is a

hard-luck story that goes back generations and Joe Bageant tells it here

with poignancy, indignation, and tinder-dry wit. Through the tale of

his own rambunctious Scots-Irish family, starting with his grandparents

Maw and Pap, Bageant traces the post-war migration of the rural poor to

the sprawling suburbs where they found, not the affluence they'd dreamed

of, but isolation and deprivation, and the bitter futility of hope.

What do the white working poor of America want, and what does America

want for them?