Shattered souls and ruined lives are the plot, and the ever-burgeoning, post-industrial wastelands created by the forces of global capitalism are the setting in Phil A. Neel’s gripping and brutal new book Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict. Part travelogue, part neo-Marxist analysis, part confession, Hinterland is the kind of work that, in lesser hands, such as those of a D.C. journalist, would have been superficial, patronizing, or, at best, semi-interesting. Neel is able to pull off this gloriously odd mixture, however, in part because he himself is a product of the very dessicated and diseased landscape he is chronicling, having spent years working its fire lines, waiting its tables, attending its protests and occupying its prison cells.
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