Synopses & Reviews
"Essential reading for understanding this country now and going forward." — Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night
On June 14, 2016, Jared Yates Sexton reported from a Donald Trump rally in Greensboro, North Carolina. One of the first journalists to attend these rallies and give mainstream readers an idea of the raw anger that occurred there, Sexton found himself in the center of a maelstrom. Following a series of tweets that saw his observations viewed well over a million times, his reporting was soon featured in The Washington Post, NPR, Bloomberg, and Mother Jones, and he would go on to write two pieces for The New York Times. Sexton gained over eighteen thousand followers on Twitter in a matter of days, and received online harassments, campaigns to get him fired from his university professorship, and death threats that changed his life forever.
The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore is a firsthand account of the events that shaped the 2016 Presidential Election and the cultural forces that powered Donald Trump into White House. Featuring in-the-field reports as well as deep analysis, Sexton’s book is not just the story of the most unexpected and divisive election in modern political history. It is also a sobering chronicle of our democracy’s political polarization — a result of our self-constructed, technologically assisted echo chambers.
Like the works of Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer — books that have paved the way for important narratives that shape how we perceive not only the politics of our time but also our way of life — The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore is an instant, essential classic, an authoritative depiction of a country struggling to make sense of itself.
Review
"First of all, this is the best book title of 2017, hands down. Second, and more importantly, this is the book to read if you want to understand what the hell happened in the United States in 2016. If you follow Sexton on Twitter (and you should), you know he brings a sharp eye, fierce intellect, and resilient capacity for surprise to the problem of American political life. And that’s just 140 characters at a time. Just imagine what he can do with 300+ pages." Bookriot
Review
"An impressionistic and often disturbing account of the 2016 presidential race... Sexton grapples with the Trump campaign from the perspective of the crowds reveling in the candidate’s presence and message. It is a useful vantage point given the increasingly blatant bigotry in the months since the election... This book reveals the incremental nature of public displays of hatred, growing from harsh chants and bumper stickers to, say, an open and unmasked gathering of white supremacists in Charlottesville... [His] dispatches are bracing." The Washington Post
Review
"Jared Yates Sexton didn’t just randomly become a phenomenon in his chronicling of Donald Trump’s fans and foibles, it happened because he’s our Jane Goodall to Trump's Deplorables. His work has been indispensable to those who have tried to understand our times, with an honesty lacking among most of our mainstream media. Read this book." Cliff Schecter, bestselling author of The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don’t Trust Him ― And Why Independents Shouldn’t and a columnist for The Daily Beast
Review
"Sexton’s reporting provides a unique nuts-and-bolts look at the campaigns, and his eyewitness reports of the aggressive displays at Trump rallies are both terrifying and fascinating." Publishers Weekly
Review
"This is the post-campaign book I was waiting for. Nothing else has shown me so clearly the ruptures in our culture aligned with Trump’s candidacy, or even the nature of the way we choose a president. Essential reading for understanding this country now and going forward." Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night
Review
"A leftist counterweight to Hillbilly Elegy, laced with shots of Hunter S. Thompson... A useful snapshot of a tumultuous presidential race." Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
Jared Yates Sexton’s political writing has appeared in The New York Times, the New Republic, Salon, and elsewhere. He is the author of three collections of fiction and a crime novel. Currently he serves as an associate professor of creative writing at Georgia Southern University.
Jared Yates Sexton on PowellsBooks.Blog
I first knew Donald Trump’s candidacy was a problem as I stood aboard the USS Yorktown aircraft carrier in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. It wasn’t the first Trump event I’d attended, but something had changed at that point. His supporters were starting to feed off his negative energy and make it their own...
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