Keen On

This is an important conversation. Few Americans are better skilled at listening than the UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild. The author of the best selling Strangers in Their Own Land, Hochschild’s much anticipated new book, Stolen Pride, takes place in Kentucky, where she examines rural loss, shame and the rise of the American Right. Hochschild’s superpower is her ability to listen. It’s what she defines as “bilingualism” - the skill in separating the literal from the symbolic in other people’s language. This bilingualism makes Hochschild one of the few members of America’s coastal elite able to truly listen to the other America. What she hears - and the rest of us miss - is the pained language of stolen pride, loss and shame. Arlie Russell Hochschild is the author of many groundbreaking books, including The Second Shift, The Managed Heart, and The Time Bind as well as Strangers in Their Own Land, which became an instant bestseller and was a finalist for a National Book Award, and Stolen Pride