The Bern Identity: A Search for Bernie Sanders and the New

The Bern Identity: A Search for Bernie Sanders and the New American Dream (Kindle Single)

It is one of the most improbable journeys in the history of American politics. How did Bernie Sanders make it out of the backwoods of Vermont â€“ where he lived for a time in a ramshackle off-road â€œsugar shackâ€ with no electricity, and where he never got more than 6 percent of the vote in a string of doomed, fringe far-left campaigns in the 1970s â€“ to become a leading contender in the 2016 race for the White House? And perhaps more importantly for author Will Bunch, how did this gruff and sometimes didactic gray-haired political survivor make it out of the 1960s and â€˜70s to become the last torch-bearer of the youthful idealism of that nearly lost â€œAge of Aquariusâ€ â€“ The One who didnâ€™t drop out, sell outâ€¦or simply give up?

In the fall of 2015, Bunch â€“ with the voices of the late Hunter S. Thompson and the other iconic â€œNew Journalistsâ€ of that lost era ringing in his ears â€“ set out on a road trip that took him from the battlefields of northern Virginia to the salty air of backwater Boston to the neon sky of the Las Vegas Strip, all to get to the bottom of â€œThe Bern Identity.â€ He follows the long strange trip of Bernie Sanders â€“ a kid from a cramped Brooklyn flat who couldnâ€™t tell a lie in school, who mourned the migration of his beloved Dodgers and was shaken up by â€œDeath of a Salesman,â€ who became a campus radical, a dreamer of revolutions, and then almost disappeared before his improbable election of mayor of Burlington in 1981.

Sandersâ€™ remarkable bio is interspersed with the tale of the true believers who packed hockey rinks and concrete convention floors in crowds of 20,000 or more, who tweeted incessantly and posted memes of Sanders flying in coach class, and who exploded with excitement at their heroâ€™s call for a â€œpolitical revolutionâ€ to raise the beleaguered middle class. In a time of rampant cynicism about American politics, â€œThe Bern Identityâ€ turns into something most unlikely â€“ a love story, between the long-distance runner who never gave up his fantasy of real social change, and the dreamers and the radicals and the formerly hopeless who were waiting for him at the finish line.

THE AUTHOR

Will Bunch is senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News â€“ where he writes the popular political blog Attytood â€“ and also shared the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting in 1992 when he was at New York Newsday. He is the author of two other Kindle Singles: October 1, 2011: The Battle of the Brooklyn Bridge, about the Occupy Wall Street movement, and Give It To Steve!, about the 1948 Philadelphia Eagles winning the NFL title during a raging blizzard. His full-length books include The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama, and Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy. His articles have also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, The Los Angeles Times, American Prospect, American Journalism Review, and elsewhere. He lives in the Philadelphia suburbs with his family.
Country USA
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2015-12-08
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2015-12-08
Format	Kindle eBook

The Bern Identity: A Search for Bernie Sanders and the New American Dream (Kindle Single)

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