Hillbilly Elegy: A memoir of a family and culture in crisis by J.D. Vance
Published in 2016, this book has remained popular and has become more controversial over the past two years. Some feel it misrepresents a segment of America, while others say it is profoundly accurate. Some feel it explains a political upheaval and some say it is not about politics. You can read it yourself to discover your own opinion. I found it to be an honest account of the hard lessons of growing up in the real world.
The following review comes from Goodreads.com:
“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 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.”
This book is available at the Craig County Public Library.
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