From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class
Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.
The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility.
But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history.
A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.
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"J. D. Vance presents the life of the Appalachian people through the prism of his life experience growing up amongst them. While he presents many of the problems facing hillbillies he doesn't suggest any hopeful solutions. If anything one comes away with the stereotypical view that hillbillies are among the least educated and most disfuctional group of people in our nation. Any suggestions of changing prevailing attitudes don't appear welcoming. The reader comes away thinking that the only way to improve Appalachian people is to shun its culture and environment. I don't know if this is the message Vance had wanted to convey but it is what one can deduct from the reading.
The book is very difficult to read. The continued dysfunction of the Appalachian home life tough to hear. It would have been nice to see what deep seeds of anger and suspicion drives the Appalachian culture to be so cruel to those on who are different (financially, culturally, religiously, etc). That piece is sorely missing to understanding the Appalachian culture."
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Difficult To Read (4 out of 5 stars)