The strong feature of this book is the many types of people who are informants. Hochschild's characters include mayors, successful workers, unsuccessful job seekers, prisoners, new-Nazis; she includes at least one Black, Jew, and Muslim--the latter three countering the image of Appalachia as all white. Immigrants came when the coal mining was going strong and became "stayers."

I am less impressed with the analysis. I agree with the concept she defines as the "pride paradox," wherein a "Protestant ethic" of working hard to succeed makes a person take responsibility and feel shame when they fail even though the failure is caused by external forces. She categorizes types of pride, and that is a strong point, but she is less convincing in claiming that all these prides are stolen and produce shame then anger. She claims the area definition of success is to reach the American Dream of earning more than one's parents, and one of her solutions is to redefine that dream to include many things more communal than the individualistic version, even climate change. With that I agree. However, there is no attention paid to rethinking/relearning the "Protestant ethic," and that too is important.

She is interested in learning why the KY district she studies is red. Though one of her questions is Why does Trump appeal here? she doesn't test her theories of answer by interviewing any who identified as Democrats. I think that would be revealing. A side issue emerges from her interviews about attitudes to race and rejections of being designated as privileged, and it is addressed in an interesting way.