WHITE TRASH: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg argues that America’s myth of being a class-free society was a lie from the first English colonization efforts, which sought to push “waste people” out of Britain to turn the New World’s virgin land into productive cropland and provide servants to the upper classes. This pattern repeated itself with the westward expansion where the real money and best lands went to speculators rather than the frontier farmers.
Isenberg followed the continuing denigration of lower-class white workers as mudsills, hillbillies, rednecks, white trash, trailer trash, etc. who couldn’t be redeemed or educated even if we tried; The Beverly Hillbillies, she argues, presents the Clampetts as completely unable to assimilate to mainstream America, even surrounded by wealth and luxury. She does note counter-arguments such as mountain folk as the Pure, Simple Americans or Elvis and Bill Clinton proving themselves Good Rednecks. She concludes with a look at the Trump era, pointing out he’s far from the first politician to supposedly champion the poor and the working class, and that his success shows poor whites embrace identity politics as much as any minority.
AMERICAN BABY: A Mother, a Child and the Shadow History of Adoption by Gabrielle Glaser uses the story of one sixteen year old Jewish girl who gave up her baby in 1961 to chronicle how ruthlessly the industry treated fallen women and how mercenary and untruthful social workers and adoption agencies could be (lying to birth parents about the wonderful new family their baby was getting and to adoptive parents about their kid’s background or heritage). Glaser does a good job dramatizing the issue but I think she’s more confident about nature trumping nurture — the real you will always depend on your birth parents! — than she should be.
As I said when reviewing Project Almanac, I have little interest in time travel stories looking at the building of the time machine or how it works; we know it’s going to work, just get to the story. In Alastair Reynolds’ PERMAFROST, however, a lot of the short novel gets taken up with designing and testing the time machine intended to save humanity with one small change to the past; I grew too bored to do more than skim it.
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