Book Fourteen 2014: 

Rainbow Pie – A Memoir Of Redneck America by Joe Bageant

This one of those wonderful “I stumbled on it in a bookstore one Sunday morning when I hadn’t really intended going in to buy anything” sort of books.

It’s both a memoir of growing up in the 50s in rural Virginia in what he calls himself “redneck country”, the disappearance of subsistence farming in such places after the second world war and a scathing attack on the creation of what he claims is an enormous poor white underclass of over 50 million and how the industrial interests of America keep them in their place to act as a huge bank of cheap labour.

Fascinating stuff and well worth your time if you want theories as to why so many Americans are so far to the religious right, why they love the Republican Party and why they believe everything Fox News sells them all from a man who claims “redneck America” as “his people”.

Loved it. A real find.