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Summary: A voice of protest
Review: The most consistently entertaining and socially important book that I have read in years. It took me all of 3 days to get through the 250+ pages of ridiculously low brow humor and absolutely brilliant social and political observations contained here. Goad deconstructs the PC liberal mindset of America and breaks 500 years of American history down to class differences and profit driven corporate politics. The most important writer I have read since Howard Zinn.
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Summary: The most important book of the 90's!
Review: This angry little book opens up a can of worms and forces you to eat it! I have a university degree and have spent a lot of time in a heavy industrial plant, so I kinda know why Mr Goad is so angry. North America is only gonna get worse for working people, so we might as well get angry together! The chapter on white working class fun and entertainment is killer and sheds light on the "party 'till ya puke" mentality of working class whites. This book made me squirm at times because it forced me to see some unpleasant realities about being a working white male in a world of MBA rich kids and sell-out white liberals. Working people of ALL races will love this book. Goad makes it OK to be angry again.
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Summary: No conservative
Review: A couple of reviewers have called this book (and Goad) "conservative." It's anything but. For one thing, current conservatives in this country cater to the Religious Right. Goad is an atheist, or at least, irreligious-witness his chapter "Prayin' Hard." In addition, he is certainly no fan of big business; in fact, it becomes perhaps his major target in the book, even outpacing "limousine liberals" for the honor.Goad is both anti-government (which may have led some to call him conservative) and anti-business. And for the same reason: he is anti-oppression, and pro-little guy. If he holds with any political philosophy, it would be anarchy. His history chapters list the continuing oppression of poor whites and blacks alike by the combined forces of government and business. The difference between blacks and poor whites is that blacks organized and got most of their rights from the government. Poor whites have never done so. But maybe organization is not their strong suit. Blacks have made us conscious of the manifest injustices done them by both slavery and segregation. Poor whites have never made us conscious of the injustices done them. Even before reading this book, I recoiled at the phrase "trailer trash." For one thing, I've seen double-wides I wouldn't mind living in. And I've know several good people who live in trailers (mobile homes). I agree with one reviewer here that Goad should have dealt with Steinbeck's GRAPES OF WRATH, with its sympathetic treatment of Okie tenant farmers and sharecroppers. And then there's the sympathetic treatment of backwoods prophets and evangelists in Flannery O'Connor's works like THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY-all the more remarkable because O'Connor is a Catholic. And also the works of Ellen Glasgow, And a novel THE TIME OF MAN (whose author I forget). One point Goad makes is "The working class doesn't write a lot of history books. The working class doesn't produce many movies or radio shows. The working class doesn't tend to hire media consultants or theatrical agents. The working class has played an itty-bitty role in fashioning its popular image." Maybe this is the real silent majority. Another point he makes is that the combined force of black poor and white poor would constitute a powerful bloc in national politics (but it probably won't happen). Basically, Goad deals with people whom others say are lacking in ambition. That is, they don't feel compelled to get ahead at any cost. But if they just want to work and live a decent life, isn't that enough?
Rating: 
Summary: Goad lives up to his name
Review: Jim Goad (can that possibly be his real last name?) has written a timely, savage, funny, and penetrating book on America's hypocrisy on race and class. Goad's writing style was designed to offend, and he spares no one in his field of view. His book is at its best when it provides the historical details of how many of America's earliest white settlers came here in chains, as either prisoners, indentured servants, or as abductees, to serve as cheap labor for plantations. His coverage of this sordid era of American history is much more extensive and well documented than anything I had previously read. Goad (which rhymes with Joad--why no mention of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath?) also shatters the myths that are constantly repeated by the media and liberal academics about "white privilege" and points out the double standards in the current depictions of "rednecks," which allow people to say things about working class whites that would not be tolerated if said about any of the "oppressed" groups currently in favor. Goad's observations answer some questions I have been thinking about. When I was in grade school in the mid-1960's, President Johnson's War on Poverty was beginning, and the concern for the poor included blacks in urban ghettoes, Native Americans on reservations, and poor, rural whites in Appalachia. After about 1970, however, one never heard again about poor whites in Appalachia, and probably not because they had all suddenly become rich. By that time, they were probably thought by liberal academics and the news media to be too "backward," too culturally conservative, and, well, too white for the rest of America to care about. This attitude is still current, as I saw recently in a documentary on a cable TV station about a trial in a small town in Alabama, in which a man who was the leader of a snake handling religious group was charged with trying to murder his wife by forcing her to put her hand into the cage of a large timber rattler. The trial attracted national media coverage, which puzzled the locals, most of whom were embarrassed by the presence of the small cult of snake handlers in their otherwise "progressive" community. One of the locals asked a reporter from a New York City newspaper why he was there to cover the trial. The answer was telling: "Back in New York, that's how they see all of you down here." Goad's book falters in the middle chapters, particularly "Workin' Hard" and "Playin' Hard." He clearly resents having to work for a living, but doesn't pose any alternative to it. He is obviously against capitalism as it is practiced in this country, but doesn't seem eager to embrace Marxism, either. He seems as incensed that blue-collar jobs are decreasing as he does with the idea that those jobs are demeaning to people. He also seems to feel that poor whites are locked into their roles as victims of the system. He doesn't ask why American society is probably the most fluid society in history, in that it is possible, within one generation, to move dramatically upward economically. Approximately 70% of American millionaires gained that status in their lifetimes by their own efforts and not by inheriting wealth. The economy has continued to expand since his book was published in 1997, unemployment is at a 30-year low, and real wages are increasing. In addition, his command of detail in those chapters fails him. For example, he rightfully lists a number of historical examples of abuse of poor white workers and their unsafe working conditions. However, all of the examples he lists occurred before 1950. He also states that "Even in the brotherly 1990s, the American workplace murders around fourteen thousand bodies yearly, not counting deaths linked to work-related illnesses." Even though he provides a footnote for this statement, it is clearly incorrect. The Bureau of Labor Statistics states that there were actually slightly less than half that number of annual occupational fatalities, and the number has been decreasing each year for the past several years, even as more workers enter the workplace and work more hours. His unsubstantiated statistics on the number of suicides and cases of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Vietnam Veterans are greatly inflated, perhaps by a factor of 10. The chapter "What's So Bad About Hatemongers, Gun Nuts, and Paranoid, Tax-Resisting Extremists?" does not convince me that he isn't at least a little paranoid. On the whole, however, much of what Goad says hits home with me. My namesake ancestor reportedly came to the US from England in the mid-1800's because he got fed up with the landed gentry smashing his crops on their foxhunts. A later generation of my ancestors worked in the lead sulfide mines of western Illinois. I grew up in a farmhouse that did not have indoor plumbing or running water until I was 10 years old. My grade school education occurred in a "consolidated" school, which is the next step up from a one-room schoolhouse. The set of encyclopedias we had at home was purchased by my mother at a garage sale in the mid-1960's, but was actually published in 1926! However, we never thought of ourselves as poor because we knew other farm families were worse off. There were 8 kids in my Eighth Grade class, all from farm families. My best friend from that class and I eventually graduated from Medical School. According to Goad, my friend and I should have been locked into a lifetime of blue-collar frustration and demeaning, marginal jobs, but it didn't turn out that way. Nothing in Goad's book explains why it didn't happen and why we weren't serfs for life. That, to me, is the biggest failing of his book.
Rating:
Summary: Insightful and Explosive
Review: A brilliant book that was the unfortunate victim of privishing. Buy it and you'll see why it was buried...
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Summary: One Of The Most Enlightening Books of All Times
Review: When I was in high school I had to sit through assemblies about black history. In college I took an entire semester of feminist studies. On the telivision I see multiculturalism thrown around as if it were a hot new religion, like scientology. It's amazing that through all of this social education, I did not know one fact about my own ancestry, my own white herritage, before I picked up The Redneck Manifesto at an inner city book store. Upon reading this book you will feel amazement first, anger second, resignation after that and then you will settle on rage. You will want to slap every liberal who tells you that you are privaledged because you are white and every conservative who talks about a "free market". Liberals will call Goad a raving conservative and conservatives will accuse him of being a Marxist, so he must be on the correct path. This book is heavily referenced, which is good, because you would not believe any of the information located between the covers of this Manifesto if Goad had not spent 10 pages at the end referencing his sources. I think that this book should be required reading, at least at Univerisity, and no American deserves to speak a word about politics until they've got the truth according to Goad. Funny, informative, enraging, 100 times better than any of the crap on the NY Times best sellers list. Read it.
Rating:
Summary: Intesting book. But Rich Republicans get a free pass
Review: This is strong stuff. I give it three stars. Very worth reading. People of all colors sometimes don't know or don't want to know that there are and have been throught history very poor abused whites. Mr Goad tells their story in a powerful personal way. O.K. That's the good part... But like I said the Republicans get a free pass. The bad part of this book is the constant Liberal bashing.Yeah some is justified but to Mr. Goad the entire privilaged class is made up of bleeding heart Liberals. He absoulutley hates 'em. The book is a venomous screed against the college educated white liberal while very little negative is said about oppression by rich conservatives. Mr Goad really realy hates middle class white liberals. Questions I have though is why nothing on the very Rich Repulicans? Sure Mr Goad, hippness may be a luxury but so is a county club membership and you don't bash country clubs. And what about those liberals who are themselves from the working class or one generation away? Paul Wellstone, working class scholarship kid. Same goes for Gloria Steinem. Is Bill Clinton an elitist while George Bush (who didn't have the balls to go to Viet Nam just like a lot of other fat cat republican frat boys) a regular guy? What do you think about John Hightower, or James Carville? These two are my kind of Rednecks . Proud of the backrounds but totally progressive and dedicated to fighting for a better future for working people. Where is your anger toward the real overclass? You bash the old Volvo driving latte Liberals but not the porsche driving country club Conservatives.
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Summary: What happened to the other reviews?
Review: Once again Amazon has screwed up the reviews - I had one here before but now the entire list has been deleted. Unbelievable. This is a great book for breaking your politically correct paradigms or explaining how reality has been deconstructed by the guilty liberal media and reconstructed into one totally disconnected from reality. Are you a white person that always wondered why affirmative action, bussing, etc. never made sense? Buy this book.
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Summary: Redneck Manifesto
Review: Basically looks at how poor and working class whites are the last acceptable target for hatred in the current pc mind control time we live in now and are the most exploited class in our current society. Goad is a very entertaining writer so despite the subject matter don't think this book is going to be some stiff uptight right wing conservative crap. More of a personal/real world look at anti-white racism and propaganda.
Rating:
Summary: Funny and informative
Review: This book can appeal to many audiences because it's funny yet at the same time well researched and full of interesting historical and sociological information and reflections. It definately changed the way I think of American society and reaffirmed some of my assumptions as well. Goad's use of racial slurs can be offensive to some, or almost everyone, but he really does have something to say that's important for everyone to know. As a black woman I had a problem with his language, but since I needed to read it for a focus group I had to press on and I'm glad I did. I wish more policy makers and educators read this book.
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