On Monday, February 3, 2025, at 3:00pm in MPR 2, the Democrats of Rossmoor Book Club will discuss Stolen Pride by Arlie Russell Hochschild. On February 27, 2025, Dr. Hochschild will make a return visit to speak at the Democratic Club’s general meeting. A Berkeley resident, she is an emeritus professor of sociology at Cal.
Of the book the publisher writes: “For all the attempts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, we’ve ignored what economic and cultural loss can do to pride. What happens, Arlie Russell Hochschild asks, when a proud people in a hard-hit region suffer the deep loss of pride and are confronted with a powerful political appeal that makes it feel ‘stolen’?
Hochschild’s research drew her to Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia, within the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the nation, where the city was reeling: Coal jobs had left, crushing poverty persisted, and a deadly drug crisis struck the region. Although Pikeville was in the political center thirty years ago, by 2016, 80 percent of the district’s population voted for Donald Trump. Her brilliant exploration of the town’s response to a white nationalist march in 2017 — a rehearsal for the deadly Unite the Right march that would soon take place in Charlottesville, Virginia — takes us deep inside a torn and suffering community.
Hochschild focuses on a group swept up in the shifting political landscape: blue-collar men. In small churches, hillside hollers, roadside diners, trailer parks, and Narcotics Anonymous meetings, Hochschild introduces us to unforgettable people, and offers an original lens through which to see them and the wider world. In Stolen Pride, Hochschild incisively explores our dangerous times, even as she also points a way forward.”
The book is $14 in the Kindle edition, $24.91 from Amazon and $31 at local booksellers. It is a very new book so there may be a waiting list at local libraries but since the book club does not meet in January we have two months to read this book. Her previous book, Strangers in Their Own Land, was a New York Times best seller. Members who bring their book to the February 27th meeting can ask Dr. Hoshschild to sign it. If it can be arranged, a local book store will be on hand to sell the book.
Membership is not required to attend the book club.