White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is an extremely dense, textbook-like read. If you want something that has a bit more pop culture flair, this is definitely not that. It's a sociological study of American class through time. It starts back at the beginning of the country and creeps slowly forward.

On the positive side, it is well-researched and informative. However, I did find it to be a very tedious read, which is better suited to scholars than your average reader. Not much seems to have been done to make the content more approachable, though I suspect it's my expectations that were the problem, not the actual book.

Since it's so dense, I'm not sure how much of this I really absorbed. While the history is important and somewhat interesting, I think I wanted more time spent on the now and where we are now, or maybe if we had started with that and then worked back and then forward again, it would have been a better read for me. I understand the logic of chronological order. It just made it hard to power through the first half to get closer to the stuff that I really wanted to read about.

Basically, I wanted the book to deliver on the White Trash title, which it doesn't for quite some time.

The narrator, Kirsten Potter, is straight forward but adds some texture and variety to a somewhat dry read, which I appreciated.

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