Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir [Paperback]

Joe Bageant (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 25, 2011

Set between 1950 and 1963, this coming-of-age memoir discusses one of America’s most taboo subjects: social class. Combining recollections, accounts, and analysis, this book leans on Maw, Pap, Ony Mae, and other members of this rambunctious Scots-Irish family to chronicle the often heartbreaking postwar journey of 22 million rural Americans into the cities, where they became the foundation of a permanent white underclass. Telling the stories of the gun-owning, uninsured, underemployed white tribes inhabiting America’s heartlands, this record offers an intimate look at what was lost in the orchestrated postwar shift from an agricultural to an urban consumer society.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Joe Bageant is a columnist and political commentator who writes for international newspapers and magazines and has appeared on U.S. national public radio and the BBC. He is the author of Deer Hunting with Jesus, which is being developed as a dramatic television series in America.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd. (February 25, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9781921640919
• ISBN-13: 978-1921640919
• ASIN: 192164091X
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #398,285 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

65 of 65 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Redneck Panegyric April 5, 2011

By Bob Kincaid

Format:Paperback

Let me be upfront about things: I want you to buy this book. I want you to buy it not because I have any financial interest in it; I don't. I want you to buy this book because it is a magnificent memorial both by and to one of the best American writers of the waning of the 20th and dawning of the 21st centuries. I want you to buy this book because, as the line from "Death of a Salesman" notes, "Attention must be paid." In this case, the attention is to a gone America, an America that was systematically dismantled and shipped both out of state and overseas. "Rainbow Pie" chronicles an America that became intolerable to the Corporate Giants who needed to wring every last drop of money out of the blood, bones and sweat of what was, at the time, a largely rural population. Only in paying attention and remembering do we have any hope of retaining any of the values that attended those gone generations.

Joe Bageant is now part of those gone generations. It was like a kick in the gut when I learned of his death, too early, at 64, from a brain cancer. In a moment of grace from the universe, however, Joe lived to see this final work published and knew that he had done his part to preserve at least the memory of a bygone lifeway, but also to make one last attempt to help one part of America see another part of which it knows largely nothing: the mostly unmentionable white underclass.

That "Rainbow Pie," is a personal memoir is certainly true. It is also, however, a panegyric to a culture very much unused to and probably uncomfortable with such treatment. Economically, it is an examination of a system that actually worked, and as such was driven to ground by a competing global system that had to crush it, regardless of the effect on the culture it displaced. Socially, it explains the nature of a people as logically deriving from a past that has been hard as long as those people have had a past. Just because I use the word "economically" and "socially," however, don't expect deadly dull, dessicated prose. Joe couldn't do that on his worst day. This redneck rememberance, this hillbilly history vibrates with the music of the language as Joe Bageant grew up with it. His forebears return briefly to life, albeit "through a glass, darkly," and those of us with similar heritage see our own reflected in that smoky glass.

For those unfamiliar with bygone redneck culture, "Rainbow Pie" will seem almost like a National Geographic travelogue. For those familiar with it, however, it will evoke quiet declarations of "Yes!" and "Of course," and "Sho' nuff!" And that's the point, too: don't be fooled into thinking this book is culture-specific. All the peoples who have had their lives, their history, their culture laid upon Corporate America's Golden Altar dedicated to the Holy Profit will see something of their own in Joe's storytelling, of the undeniable majesty of the words with which Joe closed his correspondences, of the essential values of "art and labor."

Ultimately, that's the magic of Joe's last work: in telling a specific, highly personal story, he connects us with stories that we, in our millions, have running around in our own souls. In so doing, he plants the seeds of our own rememberance and our own willingness to peel back the layers and examine why we are where we are.

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Redneck Memoir May 22, 2011

By Smith T. Powell III

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I have hanging on my wall a check that my father carried in his billfold from 28 September 1953 until his death in a tractor accident on his farm in 1977. He had sent a calf to the stockyards in hopes of selling it for twenty to fifty dollars. The check was for eight cents. It was my first lesson in the new realities of farm life. As Joe recounts, "When World War II began, 44 persent of Americans were rural, and over half of them farmed for a living. By 1970, only 5 percent were on farms."

I lived that transformation. I saw how many of our farming neighbors left their farms, or took outside jobs, or their wives took outside jobs, or both took outside jobs in order to make ends meet. I elected to leave the farm and was lucky enough to recieve help in pursuing an education that provided a road to success. Joe notes that many millions of Americans were not so successful.

Joe's memoir is a poignant telling of what was lost in that transition, of how the game was rigged against those trying to buy into the American Dream, and of how so many found that Dream just beyond their reach. So much of the story of his family sounded like the story of my family right down to the family home burning. What a tragic loss. It had been built in the 1790s.

I have urged all of my family to read this book, and now, I urge all Americans to read it. I am sure all who read "Rainbow Pie" will have a better understanding of our current situation through the life of Joe's family and many readers will recognize their own story. I hope readers will be more conscious of the poor underclass who serve as our farmers, our mechanics, our factory workers, our hair dressers, our store clerks, etc. I hope readers will reflect how we might reorganize the system to make it fairer and so that the sick and the old receive the care and support that they need. I hope that readers will no longer support calls to increase the age of retirement, which call will place an additional burden on the backs of the old and the infirm and will represent an additional transfer of wealth and of privilge from the poor to the rich.

Or, as Joe suspects, "For a few years, the powers in charge will manage to waste our remaining resources, human and natural, extending a doomed system long enough to extract those last few trillions [of dollars], instead of creating something more sustainable."

Joe is a modern prophet who, like Jeremiah or Hosea or Amos, provides a powerful indictment of our current situation and with the prophets he warns, "For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind". In Joe's words: "It's [watching tabloid TV] certainly better than contemplating America falling apart before your very eyes--not to mention the unnerving impression of inhabiting a spent empire locked in its inexorable orbit, and growing darker by the day."

I am so sorry that we no longer have Joe's voice, but I can hope that more will hear what he has said.

41 of 44 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Rainbow Pie March 12, 2011

By djekizian

Format:Paperback

This review appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald. Rainbow Pie was published in Australia and has been widely read and reviewed. This salient down-under observation is one of many toasts to the Woody Gutherie of our times.

Most Australians look upon the US with wide-eyed bewilderment. Why do Americans think public healthcare will lead to death panels? How did they ever believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the attack on the World Trade Centre? What craziness leads so many to believe Barack Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim? Why, over and over again, do they appear to fight against their own best interests? If you want answers to these questions then this dissection of the US's "white underclass" is superbly insightful.
Bruce Elder, Sydney Morning Herald 'Pick of the Week'