Sexton’s first-person account is both candidly relatable and viscerally frightening. Self-deprecating scenes of drowning his sorrows at campaign-stop pubs juxtaposed against edge-of-darkness encounters with agitators sporting MAGA-logo garb create a you-are-there immediacy. Sexton’s seamless blending of his reporter’s objectivity with the personal evaluations of a voter who has skin in the game yields trenchant analysis. Although most of his ire is reserved for the mercurial and Machiavellian Trump organization, Sexton also takes a penetrating look at the other contentious campaigns—the fervency of the Bernie camp, the fecklessness of Clinton’s overconfident team, and even a foray into the Green Party hoopla—and counts himself among the myriad pundits who absolutely did not see the end result coming. Based upon its title, readers could be forgiven for thinking this is a tsunami survivor’s memoir. With the outrage, violence, and intolerance the 2016 campaign unleashed, it very nearly qualifies. But Sexton’s is a critical and important voice in helping readers understand the cultural and political sea change the election created.

Sexton’s preoccupation with his alcohol consumption is one of the recurring oddities in The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore, an impressionistic and often disturbing account of the 2016 presidential race ... Even if marred at times by Sexton’s uninspired political analysis and unceasing affirmation of his working-class credentials, this book reveals the incremental nature of public displays of hatred ... With some books, I care most what the writer thinks, and with others, what the writer knows. The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore falls in the latter category. Sexton’s dispatches are bracing; his after-the-fact analysis less so ... published quickly for a book on the 2016 campaign, though not so quickly as to excuse its typos and cliches...Worse yet, Sexton, who teaches creative writing, delivers markedly uncreative prose, in which waters are always muddied, coffers are always lined, dealings are always shady, breath is always bated, memory lanes are always strolled and forests are always missed among trees.

I just wish he had tried to get to the story that no one really covered: what the hell happened to a country radicalize it so much in eight years and what are the terms of assuaging it? His book is entertaining in the manner of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, in that it contains one man’s quirky observations. But that becomes its biggest flaw: it is so full of fear and loathing that Sexton missed the real story of what fueled American rage ... His descriptions of Trump supporters horrify the reader ... The sections on the progressive love affair with Bernie Sanders are less salacious and upsetting, but also problematic ... Sexton is among the new breed of pundits whose online presence leaves them a tweet away from getting launched into the national conversation. The internet has so bladed and graded the journalistic hierarchy that anyone with wi-fi and a snappy point of view can get into the conversation.

...perhaps you’re ready for a wise and energetic narrative of how the United States was Putinized. Perhaps you’d be willing to consider resistance if you heard a compelling witness. If you think that knowledge of the truth is more useful than memories of pain, then The People Are Going to Rise is for you ... You may not be looking for a reminder of these days, but if you’re unwilling to keep your head in the sand, Sexton’s book will help you see and understand them better.

Beginning with the Iowa Straw Poll, dipping into the mass murder at the Emmanuel AME church, and swinging back out again, Sexton’s book is a whiplash trip through an all-too-recent election. There are quieter moments, too, of watching cable news in dingy hotels, and of drinking cheap watered-down beer with locals. But every moment is scorched through with white male rage. The book is meant to be a Kurtz-like journey into the dark heart of white Middle America but gets lost in the weeds of its own observations and instead becomes an idiosyncratic portrait of a country, revealing nothing except what our narratives have always overlooked—the concerns of women and people of color ... Sexton shreds objectivity in a valiant Gonzo-like effort. But in a book that argues we are divided and stuck in our own echo chambers, Sexton’s own divide goes unexamined, his own echo chamber unchallenged ... His contempt for Trump supporters ultimately undermines his analysis. A writer cannot offer humanity and complexity on the page while simultaneously insulting and despising his subjects. How can Sexton identify with the people he is profiling and also dismiss them with classist language? It’s a contradiction that would have been worthy of examination; instead, it’s glossed over ... fails to rise above surface-level observations, privileging white male rage over all other strains of anger that surge through America, including the anger we now see growing against the current administration.

His book sometimes feels like a leftist counterweight to Hillbilly Elegy, laced with shots of Hunter S. Thompson, and it’s clear that Sexton couldn’t believe what he had seen until it was too late. Though it lacks the stinging punch of Thompson, the book is a useful snapshot of a tumultuous presidential race.

While the Trump-acolyte demographic has been explored ad nauseam, Sexton’s reporting provides a unique nuts-and-bolts look at the campaigns, and his eyewitness reports of the aggressive displays at Trump rallies are both terrifying and fascinating. Readers still feeling raw from the election, however, may not appreciate its rehashing.