Jon Jeter's full-throttle, full-hearted epic work, Class War in America, is as spellbinding a page-turner as it is a brilliant, scholarly, and intensely personal telling of stories of race relations in this class-ridden U.S.A. Even more surprising is that he tickles your funnybone along the way with a wry brand of humor.
This is anything but a dry re-telling of history. Spanning decades of solidarity and betrayal among working people-betrayal engineered by this country's oligarchs-from the Civil War era to today, Jeter weaves together a people's history of labor unions, political economy and grassroots movements and their intersection with every segment of American society.
In stories of ordinary people you will visit heroes as diverse as Ethel Rosenberg and Tupac Shakur, Tallulah Bankhead and Fred Hampton, Howard Zinn and Richard Pryor, and villains that span the gamut from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, and Benjamin "Pitchfork" Tillman to Jimmy Carter.
And with the exquisite story-telling of a true journalist, Jeter brings to life real people and transports you to the scene of historic events.
The scope of this book is too large to capture in a few words, but when you read Class War in America you will consider yourself fortunate, uplifted, and educated in ways you could not have foreseen. As Jeter himself writes, "It would be inaccurate to say that everything you thought you knew about American history is wrong, yet you almost certainly don't know the half of it."