"Sexton’s first-person account is both candidly relatable and viscerally frightening . . . [His] seamless blending of his reporter’s objectivity with the personal evaluations of a voter who has skin in the game yields trenchant analysis . . . Sexton’s is a critical and important voice in helping readers understand the cultural and political sea change the election created." —Booklist (starred review)
When he agreed to cover the 2016 election season,journalist Jared Yates Sexton didn''t know he wasstepping into what would become—for both politicalparties—the most rageful and divisive political circusin U.S. history.
His initial dispatches showed Democrats atwar with their establishment, coming apart at theseams over the long-gestating ascendancy of HillaryClinton and the upstart momentum of BernieSanders, whose grassroots campaign provoked uprisingsof people desperate for change. Then, onJune 14, Sexton attended a Donald Trump rallyin Greensboro, North Carolina. One of the firstjournalists to witness these rallies and give mainstreamreaders an idea of the raw anger that occurredthere, Sexton found himself in the center ofa maelstrom. Following a series of tweets that sawhis observations viewed well over 1 million times,his reporting was soon featured in The WashingtonPost, NPR, Bloomberg, and Mother Jones, and hewould go on to write two pieces for The New YorkTimes. Sexton gained more than 18,000 followerson Twitter in a matter of days, and received onlineharassments, campaigns to get him fired from hisuniversity professorship, and death threats thatchanged his life forever.
The People Are Going to Rise Like the WatersUpon Your Shore is a firsthand account of the eventsthat shaped the 2016 presidential election and thecultural forces that divided both parties and poweredDonald Trump into the White House. Featuringin-the-field reports as well as deep analysis, Sexton''sbook is not just the story of the most unexpected and divisive election in modern political history. Itis also a sobering chronicle of our democracy''s politicalpolarization—a result of our self-constructed,technologically assisted echo chambers.
Like the works of Hunter S. Thompson andNorman Mailer—books that have paved the way forimportant narratives that shape how we perceivenot only the politics of our time but also our way oflife—The People Are Going to Rise Like the WatersUpon Your Shore is an instant classic, an authoritativedepiction of a country struggling to make sense of itself.
