Metropolitan Books, New York, 2004. Slight stain at top of dustjacket spine, and another small stain area at top of front cover, otherwise good secondhand copy.

Thomas Frank turns his eye on what he calls "the Great Backlash" - the popular revolt against a supposedly liberal establishment. Marshaling public outrage over everything from improper flag display to un-Christian art, the backlash has achieved the most unnatural of alliances, bringing together blue-collar midwesterners and Wall Street business interests, workers and bosses, populists and right-wingers. In asking "What's the matter with Kansas?" - how a place famous for its radicalism came to rank among the nation's most eager audiences for backlash bunkum - Frank, a native Kansan and onetime conservative, seeks to answer some fundamental American riddles: Why do so many Americans vote against their economic and social interests? Where's the outrage at corporate thievery? Why do illusory slights to the Ten Commandments trouble some people more than do the prospects of falling wages or monopoly power or the destruction of their very way of life?

What's the Matter with Kansas? is a portrait of an upside-down country where blue-collar patriots recite the Pledge while they strangle their life chances; where small farmers cast votes for an economic order that will eventually push them off the land; and where a group of frat boys, lawyers, and CEOs has managed to convince the world that it speaks on behalf of the common People.