A review by noahbw
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

4.0

I think this is an important and helpful read, though not necessarily the "best book." I really appreciated Hochschild's presence as a narrator throughout, particularly when she would catch herself as inserting her own opinion or being "stuck on her own side of the empathy wall." I do think that her "deep story" and archetypal characters are illuminating, but I would have loved a greater understanding of the historical factors that created them -- though perhaps this is a disciplinary problem more than anything else. I appreciate that this is a pretty brief and accessible read (only about 250 pages, broken into digestible chapters), but I wish there had been more depth. I finished feeling like she certainly opened something up here, but I didn't feel like I have fully gotten it -- perhaps because of my own empathy wall. Although the book predominantly describes the experiences of and relationships between people, it reads in a very social science kind of way, rather than nonfiction that reads more like a memoir or novel, and perhaps if I felt like I as the reader was more a part of the narrative, I would have a greater sense of what it means to be part of that deep story myself.