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Summary: The best book I have read in a long time.
Review: Brilliant! The best book on contemporary America's class problems that I have ever read. Funny, and at times depressing, but right on target.
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Summary: I think this book is something everyone should read
Review: After reading the Redneck Manifesto by Jim Goad I think he hit the head on the nail about how our country's real problems are not race related but class related. It was once said that politics is the shadow big business casts down on society. Jim Goad explains this perfectly showing how programs like affirmative action and reparations are used by the elites of this country to divided the working classes. Divide and conquer is the name of the game. More importanly what the author is pointing to is that as we move into the twenty first century and the millenium. Class politics and class struggle will be the big issues of the day. Just as race was to the twentyieth century. And there is also hope that us rednecks can have our place in heaven with all the other people's of the world. Luke Mead
Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: Finally someone can see what's really going on in America. I have had to listen to people constantly rant and rave about racism but not a peep about classism. Well Goad was right that we "rednecks" aren't going to take it anymore. It's time to bring back the unions. Stop the Corporate World Order and put our oppressors in their place.
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Summary: BRILLIANT, Informative masterpiece.
Review: I am from Kentucky - the foothills of the Appalachians - and I have a hard time believing Mr. Goad isn't. He obliterates media maintained disinformation concerning the south and rednecks with a writing style that is as reserved and polite as a sledgehammer to the forehead.
He is a BF Skinner of the bar stool....
Chaz Kiser
Rating: 
Summary: a candid and vulgar attempt
Review: The Good: Goad's main point in this book is that class is more significant than race. He illustrates this with some US history, pointing out the fact that poor whites were historically as low in society as black slaves. The media and popular culture treat low-class whites unfairly. This is a valid point. The Bad: Goad paints too rosy a picture for minorities in the USA. I suppose he thinks Asian males get fair treatment in the media and popular culture? Get real, Goad. Having people of different colors in Coca-Cola or Gap ads doesn't make everything right and good for them. Yes, classism is an ugly issue that is mostly ignored in the US. But this doesn't lessen the significance of racism and racial strata.
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Summary: this book should be required reading for all college student
Review: Let me start off by saying to the folks that point out the flaws of Jim Goad, in an attempt to discredit this book, that what matters is what is between the front and back covers of a book, not what you think of the guys personality who wrote it. What matters are how well argued his points are, the amount of research he put into the tome, and whether he backs up his claims, All of which i think he did an outstanding job. I think this book is one of the most important documents of our times. This book gives a much needed reality check, to the hogwash we learn from the media and schools. I gave a copy to a college professor of mine, and although he was skeptical at first, after reading the book, he told me it was a major eye opener for him. He had no idea about the many things the book reveals such as the fact that whites were slaves as well and the many other such truths that seem to evade so many in academia. I have bought 6 copies so far and plan to buy more and pass them out to my friends and family. The truth won't be told unless we tell it. I advise anybody reading my review to buy this book and read it and take heed its contents. Then share it with friends and family. Tell others about the book Buy them copies if you have to and donate copies to libraries, and give copies to teachers and professors, and give them the reality sandwich they so badly need. This book hasn't received hardly any of the attention it deserves. So it is up to us readers to make sure it gets that attention. Thanks for listening.
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Summary: The class war is coming. Get in on the ground floor.
Review: Jim Goad, The Redneck Manifesto (Simon and Schuster, 1997)
Three years before the publication of The Redneck Manifesto, Jim Goad was self-releasing the magazine ANSWER Me! on his own press, Goad to Hell Publications (who also published Peter Sotos' first collection, one of the only books I know of that was actively suppressed before being challenged through official channels), and standing trial for obscenity for issue #4. Fast-forward to 1997, and he's getting a hardback first-printing for a book I wouldn't have thought a major publisher would touch with a ten-foot pole.
Maybe there IS some small hope for the world.
That, ultimately, is what The Redneck Manifesto is about-- hope. Most people probably won't figure that out from reading it, though.
The Redneck Manifesto is a two-hundred-fifty page rant, I grant you, but it is a savagely intelligent, well-researched, and downright laugh-out-loud funny rant, and like all the best rants throughout history, it has at its core both a simple truth, that the redneck is the last subsection of American society against which it's permissible to be prejudiced, and a solution to that truth, which in this case is that the rednecks, and the people who oppress the rednecks, have a common enemy who has manipulated them into being enemies.
This is nothing new, of course. The power elite have been manipulating segments of the great unwashed against each other throughout human history. They're still doing it. (The Israelis and the Palestinians, anyone? The Orange Irish and the Green Irish? Shiites and Sunnis? The Tutsi and the Hutu? We could keep going like this all day.)
Goad has a plan to get everyone clear-headed, but to say it's confrontational would be understating the case somewhat. His thrust in the first segment of the book is to make you aware that the word "redneck" is as much a slur as are many other words that we recognize as slurs now (and are thus unprintable in an Amazon review), and he does so by using them. A lot. For most people, there's going to be a shock factor, though it's surmountable-- especially if you're paying attention to what Goad is driving at.
From there, he launches into a very well-researched history of the redneck, which further clarifies a point he made in the beginning: that the modern redneck, contrary to popular wisdom, is not the architect of American race-hatred; quite the opposite. It's the book's most "scholarly" section, but it still reads like a rant, and that's a wonderful thing.
After that, three chapters on the culture of the redneck. It should be no surprise to those who know Goad's work that they come off kind of like a rapper telling N-word jokes; "it's okay, because I'm a member of the oppressed group." There's more to it than that, though; Goad is a misanthrope more than he is a redneck, and you can't just turn off the jaundiced-eye filter. This, ultimately, is what gives the book its highest street-cred marks; Goad doesn't make the same mistake other oppressed-minority writers do in confusing a desire for equality with a desire for revenge. He's not talking about the redneck rising supreme to put its boot on the neck of any other oppressed minority, he's talking about all of them, with all their many faults, rising up as one to overthrow The Man.
The book concludes with a strenuous, energetic dissection of those groups who really need to be brought down with extreme prejudice. If you don't get fired up after reading the chapter on the banking industry, pal, check your pulse.
This is an important piece of work, and it's especially relevant in the post-2004-election atmosphere of restless natives presently pervading the country. If you're breaking your back for The Man, be you white collar, blue collar, no collar, redneck, black neck, white neck, jobless, homeless, whatever, read this book. It is, potentially, a life-changing experience. *****
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Summary: Worth tolerating obscenity for
Review: If you can run the gauntlet of excessive, gratuitious profanity, you will find some worthwhile ideas that perhaps have never crossed your mind before. His history lessons are not the ones you remember from high school. It makes me wonder how many other lies and half-truths we're not aware of.
Mr. Goad is very intelligent, but I don't think I'd want to live next door to him.
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Summary: Don't let the title fool you
Review: This was a fun and entertaining read. It is not so much about "rednecks" that we think of, but of the underclass of America. Very thought provoking.
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Summary: I guess we're ALL just rednecks at heart
Review: I recently re-opened this book after first reading it in 1997, and dammit, it sure has aged well. Jim Goad is one of the few brave souls in this world willing to risk total ostracization for speaking of truths that many refuse to acknowledge. I would never go as far as to saw that the man's work is flawless, but when he hits the mark, he sure packs a wallop. There's a line in the film The Usual Suspects 'The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled is convincing people that he doesn't exist' that could aptly be applied to the content in this book. The greatest trick that ANY government or feudal lord or king has ever pulled is to have people focus on petty b.s., like racism, homophobia, child abuse and other social-humanist issues, thereby having people blame and turn on one another, distracting them while the people on top go about doing their dirty business. Goad brilliantly touches upon all these things in this book. The greatest perpatrators of slavery were rich plantation owners, mostly in the South. That's a given. Somehow, over time, the redneck, hillbilly, Johnny Reb loving, toothless, sister-loving, POOR Southerner has become responsible for hundreds of years of slavery. The redneck is now society's pariah. The guys who, to this very day, are only half a step above Southern blacks on the socio-economic scale, are now viewed as the 'enemy' 'the evil ones' the ones that are to blame for preventing us from reaching a 'Utopian' world. Of course, everyone, from Oprah Winfrey on down, has a hard time grasping the possibility that MAYBE people in power perpetuate these conflicts between races and genders and such, so as to keep the focus away from THEM. The NAACP gets up in arms over the Confederate symbol still being on the Georgia and Mississippi state flags, but lost amid all the history books is the fact that President Abraham Lincoln didn't want equality for the black folks, he just freed the slaves to destroy the economy of the South. Jim Crow laws and segregation in the South was horrible, but so is herding blacks in northern cities into ghettos like cattle. More facts that may have been lost in the quagmire that is popular American history is how Arabs were some of the first slave traders in Africa, and how many African leaders WILLINGLY traded and sold their OWN people into slavery. It wasn't JUST white people responsible for the world's ills, and there's even less of a chance that it was the white lower classes, be they from America, England or wherever. I mean, no serf owned a ship that could carry that many slaves across the Atlantic. For that you needed MONEY: What becomes evident then, is an insatiable need for people to believe that they are good and righteous and for their country and its leaders to also be representative of that. Simplifying history to soothe someone's conscience is a ghastly thing and it is people like Jim Goad who are there to throw a monkey wrench into the machinery. Goad does a brilliant job at pointing out that the black and white underclass really ARE in the same boat. One part of the book I found especially insightful was Goad's theory of why the black and white underclass seem to engage in self-destructive behaviour. In 'Party Hard' Goad points out the rampant drug use and reckless alcoholism that lead to the troubles that become fodder for TV shows like COPS. Basically, the point is that all these people do is work hard...of course they're gonna play hard as well. When there's really no hope for tomorrow, why not party that way? Survival only means going back to a dead-end job anyway, so why not risk death while letting loose? Goad has a knack for pointing out things in such a way that it all comes across as general common sense. Thankfully, Goad never panders to redneck chic but recognizes that, by current standards, he too comes from a long line of ''hicks from out in the stix.'' Basically, every society needs someone to dump their sewage on, from blacks back throughout American history, to barbarian hordes in Roman times, to gypsies throughout Eastern Europe, to the uncivilized masses from time immemorial in Western Europe to this generation's 'white trash'. Of course, people always find reasons why these people somehow 'deserve' to be mistreated. The only problem I had with is his sometimes juvenile tendency to get into scatological humour, but that's easily overlooked. With a small mountain of references and resources to back him up, it's very difficult to discredit or dismiss Goad. Imagine if you will, people of all races, colors and creeds uniting against their common oppressor. That's what this book hints at, the possibility of people putting everything aside, except for economic status and class distinctions, and the power that would be contained within that one united front. Then again, if the Slavs could put aside all their petty hatreds and religious differences and the weight of history, they'd be the most powerful people on the planet. Of course, life doesn't mirror fantasy and this book may really just be another trickle of information that'll be lost in the uphill battle against the forces that control and dominate the mainstream's sources of information. Still, its a worthy read and a valuable addition to any history buff's library.
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