Everything Books: 6-23-17

Nonfiction book club meets Tuesday

Kona Stories hosts a nonfiction book club discussing “White Trash, The 400-year Untold History of Class in America” by Nancy Isenberg on Tuesday.

The group meets at 6 p.m. at the store. Book groups are free if books are purchased at Kona Stories, or a $5 donation is requested.

The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement to today’s hillbillies. They were alternately known as “waste people,” “offals,” “rubbish,” “lazy lubbers,” and “crackers.” By the 1850s, the downtrodden included so-called “clay eaters” and “sandhillers,” known for prematurely aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and listless minds.

Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early 19th century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics — a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society; they haunt us in reality TV shows like “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” and “Duck Dynasty.” Marginalized as a class, white trash has always been at or near the center of major political debates over the character of the American identity.

Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature and scientific theories over 400 years, Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society — where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility — in this New York Times Best Seller.

Info: Brenda or Joy, 324-0350, www.konastories.com. ■