PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIsenberg’s story is not, as her subtitle suggests, 'untold.' But she retells it with unusual ambition and (to use a class-laden term) in a masterly manner. Ranging from John Rolfe and Pocahontas to The Beverly Hillbillies, Isenberg provides a cultural history of changing concepts of class and inferiority ... In the book’s most ingenious passages, Isenberg offers a catalog of the insulting terms well-off Americans used to denigrate their economic inferiors ... Isenberg makes a strong case that one of the most common ways of stigmatizing poor people was to question their racial identity ... But Isenberg falls prey to one of the most common and pernicious fallacies in American popular discourse about class: For her, America’s landless farmers and precarious workers are by default white. 'Class,' she writes, 'had its own singular and powerful dynamic, apart from its intersection with race.' Thus we get a history of class in America that discusses white tenant farmers at length, but scarcely mentions black sharecroppers or Mexican farmworkers.
Mitchell Duneier
PositiveBookforumDuneier’s intellectual biographies sparkle with revealing details ... Duneier offers one of the best—and certainly the most readable—accounts of the transformation of American sociological thinking on race. Like the most accomplished intellectual biographers, he situates his subjects in fierce debate with their contemporaries and with each other ... But this historian wanted to read a little more sociology in these pages. For all the power of Duneier’s intellectual biographies, the topic of ghettoization sometimes slips out of view. His book is ultimately about the idea of the ghetto, not the place itself. He offers only fleeting explanations of why a system of residential segregation by race emerged in early-twentieth-century American cities.
