...an energetic, open-minded quest to understand ... Hochschild is a woman of the left, but her mission is empathy, not polemics. She takes seriously the Tea Partiers’ complaints that they have become the 'strangers' of the title ... While her hopes of finding common political ground seem overly optimistic, this is a smart, respectful and compelling book.
Hochschild is a brilliant sociologist and a great teacher, able to explain complex ideas in lucid, logical prose. But to get alienated parties over this very high empathy wall, she has to be a great human being, too. Her connection and kindness to the people she meets is what makes this book so powerful.
In this case Hochschild arrives with so many preconceived ideas that they undercut the insight she claims to desire ... Hochschild interrupts their stories to place everything in a formulaic big-picture context, a capitalized and italicized theory of the right. The author, we learn, hopes to scale the Empathy Wall and learn the Deep Story that can resolve the Great Paradox through a Keyhole Issue. These contrivances guide, and ruin, this book.
In the age of Trump — and amid yet another natural disaster in Louisiana that cries out for urgent federal relief — her book could not be more timely ... The importance of emotion in politics, not just facts and figures, she writes convincingly, is critical to understand ... she encourages readers to scale the 'empathy wall,' to understand where such feelings might come from.
Strangers in Their Own Land is the most satisfying example yet of this fish-out-of-water approach, with a premise out of Preston Sturges ... [Hochschild] makes a point of being on good terms with the people she studies. She refers to them as her 'friends,' dedicates the book to them, and praises them for being 'caring'...Yet these warm and caring people say the darnedest things, particularly when it comes to immigrants...Hochschild shows such an excess of good faith that it comes to seem a form of naiveté ... We come to know Hochschild’s subjects intimately: their thoughts, their prejudices, and most of all their fears, which form the foundation of their worldview. But we never get the sense that they know themselves.
...an astute study of America’s 'culture war' drawn from the perspective of the white conservatives who feel they are losing it. But it is also a Bildungsroman: one woman’s journey across the political divide, to an empathy with those on the other side ... It is a convincing thesis, but not a new one. That conservative white middle-class and working-class Americans feel a sense of betrayal and loss is familiar territory. Ms Hochschild has little new to say ... The anger and hurt of the author’s interviewees is intelligible to all. In today’s political climate, this may be invaluable.
Unlike many contemporary social scientists, she doesn’t rely on statistical studies, the prevailing 'literature,' or newspaper clips. Instead, Hochschild went to Louisiana and talked to people—and not just for a couple of days, but for over half a decade ... [However] by giving so much prominence to their worldview’s emotional sources, her important new book ends up reinforcing—rather than bridging—the gap between her own convictions and those of the people she set out to understand ... Hochschild’s portrayal of Southwest Louisiana is extremely poignant ... But the central problem with Hochschild’s analysis is that she places too much emphasis on the Tea Party’s deep story.
...extraordinary for its consistent empathy and the attention it pays to the emotional terrain of politics. It is billed as a book for this moment, but it will endure ... Why do these smart and compassionate people — and many of the people Hochschild interviews are clearly both — support Trump? If that’s a question you’ve asked, Hochschild’s book is the perfect place to start. Without caricature or condescension, she has shared their world with us.
...[an] important and compelling new book ... one reason Strangers in Their Own Land is so timely is that it explains the emotional release that Trump—who has disparaged Mexicans, Muslims, women, and the disabled and who had won the support of most of Hochschild’s subjects during the primaries—provides ... Despite the fact that her own political leanings are, well, what you’d expect a Berkeley sociologist’s to be, Hochschild treats her subjects with boundless compassion and affection.
Hochschild has gone about her investigation diligently and with an appealing humility ... one of the merits of her book is to give a more thoughtful, nuanced view of [Trump's] constituency than do newspaper snapshots of aggrieved white nationalists ... The irony in all this strenuous empathizing is that 'my Louisiana friends,' as Hochschild calls her subjects, are weary of empathy itself. They’ve had enough of liberals’ high-minded concerns ... Unfortunately, the second half of the book is encumbered by a clunky thesis, a result she’s extracted from her research and serves up in the form of a 'deep story' of the American Right, one that 'tells us how things feel' to the people she’s met.
