Stolen Pride

From the bestselling, National Book Award finalist, author of Strangers in Their Own Land, an intimate glimpse into the cultural factors that gave rise to the right in one of our countrys most overlooked regionsAppalachia, with a new afterword by the authorFor all the attempts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, weve ignored one critical question: what can economic and cultural loss do to pride? What happens, Arlie Russell Hochschild asks, in a work called one of the years most important books by Counterpunch, when the people of a hard-hit, long-ignored, region are grappling with a loss of pride while being confronted with a powerful political appealone that makes it feel stolen?Hochschilds research drew her to Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia, within the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the nation, where the city is reeling: coal jobs have left, crushing poverty persists, and a deadly drug crisis has struck the region. Although Pikeville was in the political center thirty years ago, by 2016, 80 percent of the districts population voted for Donald Trump.Hochschild, a curious and skilled listener (Financial Times), focuses on a group swept up in the shifting political landscape: blue-collar men. In small churches, hillside hollers, roadside diners, trailer parks, and Narcotics Anonymous meetings, she introduces us to unforgettable people, and offers an original lens through which to see them and the wider world.