Selected as one of Publishers Weekly's Top Ten picks for Politics & Current Events of Fall 2016
A grippingly intimate and heart-breaking portrait of the walking wounded who make up the base of the Trump movement. Desperate and angry, these are the men and women of the vanishing industrial heartland and the depressed Appalachian coal country and the drug-running, no-man's land along the Southwestern borderlands. They have no illusions about the grandstanding billionaire and his glaring flaws. But they feel forgotten and screwed over by political, corporate and media elites...and they feel that Donald Trump, despite his flamboyant demagoguery, might well be their last chance for salvation. Part Studs Terkel, part Hunter S. Thompson, Alexander Zaitchik takes us deeper into the ravaged soul of America than any other chronicler of our times.
Praise for Alexander Zaitchik's Common Sense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance:
"A sharp and informative smackdown. For Zaitchik, [Glenn] Beck is just one more American con artist in the P.T. Barnum tradition, a shameless pseudoconservative bottom-feeder who will say anything to keep the spotlight on himself while the money rolls in."
--Mark Lilla, The New York Review of Books
"A sensational book... This is a beautifully written and insightful biography--thoughtful, considered, and very intentional about the need to understand Beck both as a symbol of something larger going on in America and as a person."
--Susan Gardner, Daily Kos
"A scathing profile that follows the powerful pundit from a single-parent home in rural Washington state to conservative superstardom."
--The Boston Globe
"A great political book. Zaitchik tells [Beck's story] well and nobody has told it more soberly."
--Slate
"An informative study."
--Sean Wilentz, The New Yorker
"A gripping and thoroughly researched biography."
--Joe Conason, Salon