We're Still Here

Pain and Politics in the Heart of America

By: Jennifer M. Silva

Narrated by: Teri Schnaubelt

In We're Still Here, Jennifer M. Silva tells a deep, multi-generational story of pain, place, and politics that will endure long after the Trump administration. Drawing on over 100 interviews with black, white, and Latino working-class residents of a declining coal town in Pennsylvania, Silva reveals how the decline of the American Dream is lived and felt. The routines and rhythms of traditional working-class life such as manual labor, unions, marriage, church, and social clubs have diminished. In their place, she argues, individualized strategies for coping with pain, and finding personal redemption, have themselves become sources of political stimulus and reaction among the working class. Understanding how generations of Democratic voters come to reject the social safety net and often politics altogether requires moving beyond simple partisanship into a maze of addiction, joblessness, family disruption, violence, and trauma. Instead, Silva argues that we need to uncover the relationships, loyalties, longings, and moral visions that underlie and generate the civic and political disengagement of working-class people.

We're Still Here provides powerful, on the ground evidence of the remaking of working-class identity and politics that will spark new tensions but also open up the possibility for shifting alliances and new possibilities.

©2019 Oxford University Press (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

amazing book

Amazingly gentle and nuanced account of people whose stories are rarely told. A magnificent book.

Great book. Narration was cringe at times

I enjoyed that the person doing the narration tried to “act out” different voices but some of them felt offensive. Overall, it’s good and I got through the book fairly quickly