Rainbow Pie: A Memoir of Redneck America - Softcover

As Obama's triumphant 'Yes we can' continues to reverberate, it's tempting to believe that a new era of opportunity has dawned. But there still are several million dirt-poor, disgruntled Americans for whom 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.

JOE BAGEANT has been writing about counterculture and popular culture for magazines and newspapers since the 1970s and his online column (www.joebageant.com) has made him a cult hero among gonzo-journalism junkies and progressives. He recently returned to live in his hometown. Deer Hunting With Jesus (Portobello, 2008) was his first book.