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...
Rating: 
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: 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: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A book that puts an awful lot in perspective....
Review: I've got an awful lot of education in me, and this might be the most important book that I've read left off of every syllabus ever.... In haute culture and academia, the only acceptible slurs allowed are against those poor and white. Whereas a person raised impoverished in Harlem (where I live...) or South Central L.A. might be given compassion, a person raised in Boone County, West Virginia or Paducah, Kentucky would be derrided as "ignotant" or "white trash". The ways in which the poor are portrayed/exploited on Jerry Springer for the entertainment of the masses would be attacked by the Cornell Wests of the black community if the people shown were generally African-American (and rightfully so...) The rich and white just view the people on them as scum, beneath them, and not worth neither time nor pity. Jim Goad searches for a reason why in this book. It's humor betrays some of the bitter points that it makes; if it was a strictly academic book, it would have never been published outside of Appalachia and then, only read by the small subgenre of people into Appalachian studies (read: the study of poor white people and the black people who live near them.... there aren't people of any other color...) As it is, it's found a rather marginal audience. It's a really important book. Everyone should read it: especially those who've read out the Fanon, and W.E.B. du Bois, and Malcolm X... and the people who don't read at all.... and search for an answer WHY the last person who did any meaningful work on the problem of poor white people was Karl Marx..... (betcha someone is going to write me on that point...) PLEASE read this book!!!
Rating:
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.
Rating:
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. *****
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.
Rating:
Summary: Caustic Condemnation of liberal american hypocrisy
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.
Rating:
Summary: The Redneck Manifesto: Outrageous Truths?
Review: This book is a scathing critique of political correctness and a spirited defense of the white working class. I believe the main points of the book are: 1. Lower class white people, especially from the south and Appalachia, are being scapegoated and made to take the blame for all of America's sins. 2. America's "dirtiest little secret" is not racism but classism, and 3. Multiculturalism and political correctness are upper class philosophies which serve the interests of the upper classes by keeping the lower clases divided. Despite the biting, caustic nature of the book, I believe Mr. Goad presents an effective argument. He has done a thorough job of research and marshalled much evidence in support of his position. The book will be considered outrageous and offensive by some, but the truth sometimes is offensive. The book is uneven in some ways - I believe his argument defending hate groups will be considered unacceptable to many. However, I believe the book contains enough truth to make it necesary reading for anyone truly concerned about the problems facing America today
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