Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Woolly Wilds of the Real America - Hardcover

by Kevin D. Williamson (Author)

"You can't truly understand the country you're living in without reading Williamson." --Rich Lowry, National Review

"His observations on American culture, history, and politics capture the moment we're in--and where we are going." --Dana Perino, Fox News

An Appalachian economy that uses cases of Pepsi as money. Life in a homeless camp in Austin. A young woman whose r sum reads, "Topless Chick, Uncredited."

Remorselessly unsentimental, Kevin D. Williamson is a chronicler of American underclass dysfunction unlike any other. From the hollows of Eastern Kentucky to the porn business in Las Vegas, from the casinos of Atlantic City to the heroin rehabs of New Orleans, he depicts an often brutal reality that does not fit nicely into any political narrative or comfort any partisan.

Coming from the world he writes about, Williamson understands it in a way that most commentators on American politics and culture simply can't. In these sometimes savage and often hilarious essays, he takes readers on a wild tour of the wreckage of the American republic--the "white minstrel show" of right-wing grievance politics, progressive politicians addicted to gambling revenue, the culture of passive victimhood, and the reality of permanent poverty.

Unsparing yet never unsympathetic, Big White Ghetto provides essential insight into an enormous but forgotten segment of American society.

Author Biography

KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON has written for the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Indian Express, Playboy, The New Criterion, Academic Questions, and Commentary, and for an infamous three days he was a staff writer at The Atlantic. A reporter and columnist for National Review, he has taught at Hillsdale and the King's College and writes a regular column for the New York Post. His previous books include The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics.