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

by Kevin D. Williamson

Overview

"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 résumé 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781621579694
Publisher:	Skyhorse Publishing
Publication date:	11/17/2020
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	181,009
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Big White Ghetto 1

White Trash Receptacle 15

I Am Cancer 29

"Boy" 35

The Weed Man Is All Up in the Chamber of Commerce 51

The Wisenheimers of Cabrini-Green 61

Screaming Man 71

Play to Extinction 79

Topless Chick, Uncredited 89

Whose Streets? 101

Sunny California, Shady Russians 109

Der Apfelstrudelführers 117

Down and Out in R.A.T.T. Town 129

Death of a Fucking Salesman 139

Adventures in National Socialism 143

Farming Dirty 153

Among the Flat-Earthers 165

Pillars of Fire 171

In the Valley of the Giant Robots 181

The White Minstrel Show 195

Dead Broke and Stone-Cold Stupid in Paradise 207

Sinners in the Hands of an Indifferent God 215

Acknowledgments 219

Notes 223

Index 227

Editorial Reviews

No commentator on America’s current discontents matches Kevin Williamson’s written pyrotechnics, which feature indignation laced with wit and information delivered with moral urgency. He writes often about the problem of addiction but is himself a cause of a wholesome addiction. I am among the many readers who are Williamson addicts.”

—GEORGE F. WILL, Washington Post

“When Kevin Williamson posts a piece, I shush the room so I can concentrate on every word. His observations on American culture, history, and politics capture the moment we’re in—and where we are going.”

—DANA PERINO, Fox News

“Kevin Williamson may be one of the most difficult writers in America to categorize. He’s an unapologetic defender of some unfashionable orthodoxies and a blistering critic of fashionable pieties—across the ideological spectrum. This collection is Williamson in full: Veering between laugh-out-loud funny and soberingly, even dismayingly, insightful, he brings an unsparing eye for the truth as he finds it. As difficult as Kevin is to label, he’s even harder to ignore, as anyone lucky enough to pick up this book will soon discover.”

—JONAH GOLDBERG, The Dispatch

“This book is classic Kevin Williamson—wildly entertaining, unsparing, brimming with insight, eloquent, and, above all, fearless. You can’t truly understand the country you’re living in without reading Williamson on the white working class that he himself came from and that he vividly describes without regard to any piety, right or left.”

—RICH LOWRY, National Review

From the Publisher