Turning to Books to
Understand the Election

9780399594496_ac64d  Hillbilly Elegy  9781620972250_2d0ce

On the day after the election, Amazon’s sales rankings indicate people are turning to books to make sense of the Trump win. Trump’s own book from 2004 , Trump: The Art of the Deal (PRH/Ballantine) rose to #65. Trump’s co-writer on the book, Tony Schwartz, is now a Trump critic and says he regrets the role the book played in building the Trump image.

Already a best seller and widely regarded as the book that helps explain what fuels the anger of many among the white working class, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by J. D. Vance (Harper; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample) moved from #13 to #3.

An examination of the Tea Party, the National Book Award finalist, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild, (The New Press, 2016, NYT review) also shows a significant uptick.

We can expect to see many more books on the subject in the upcoming months.

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