Christine Trost and Lawrence Rosenthal, eds. “Steep: The Precipitous Rise of the Tea Party” (University of California Press, 2012)

Christine Trost is program director of the Center for Right-Wing Studies and associate director of the UC Berkeley’s Institute for the Study of Societal Issues. Her co-editor is Lawrence Rosenthal, executive director and lead researchers of Center for Right-Wing Studies at Berkeley. The volume includes chapters by scholars such Alan Abramowitz (Emory University), Martin Cohen (James Madison University), Clarence Lo (University of Missouri at Columbia), but also has several chapters written by practitioners, lending the book a varied assessment on the Tea Party. These authors unearth what Trost and Rosenthal call the “stunning” emergence of the Tea Party following the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Chapters situate the Tea Party in its historical context and consider the extent to which this social movement is best understood as emerging from the grassroots or whether it is better placed into the national conservative movement. The collection is informative and deeply readable together and as individual chapters.

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