I was a bit worried when I started to read this and found that the author is " a bell bottom lefty" and a " Godless Commie" (his descriptions of himself). I thought I was going to have to wade through 270 pages of lefty whinging.
It was a nice surprise to find that only about a third of it is lefty whinging.
The author returned to his home town of Winchester ,Virginia after an absence of thirty years. He writes about the town ,its industry , people he knows as well as family members still living there.
I got the impression that this place was about of the size of Petticoat Junction, but a bit a research informed me that there are in fact 23,000 souls resident in Winchester, so I found Bageant's assertion that he knows everybody in town and their antecedents a bit of an exaggeration.
The premise of most of these essays is that with universal health care and education all will be rectified in Winchester and it follows the whole U S of A. This is a familiar call from the left, but as always there are plenty of reasons why, but never any solutions as to how or who is going to finance all this.
He uses as examples of the working poor a number of people that he knows from childhood. The disturbing thing here is that most of these people spend a lot of time at the local bar. Now from experience if you spend a lot of time at the local bar smoking and drinking you will have health issues and get very little done. But local bars are great places for people to moan about their lot in life ,.... as they have another beer and cigarette and get just a bit unhealthier..............
What redeems this whole book for me is the best, most balanced essay, on gun control that I have ever read. Even though he is from the far left Bageant understands the use and necessity of firearms, particuarly in the rural setting of his home town. If all gun control advocates (nuts?) read this and opened their minds there would be no debate.Very good writing indeed.
One more thing that makes this different from normal socialist writing is that Bageant has a sense of humour and can be very funny. Normally people from the left are so busy telling everyone how to live their lives that they have their humour bone amputated. e.g a million battered women out there and I've been eating mine plain.
Recommended more for the left leaning but certainly not a waste of time.
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