HarperCollins Paperbacks
New York, NY, 2016
288 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0062300553
Readers will find here a fascinating and profoundly valuable insight into the daily realities of an entire marginalized segment of American society. Readers would be wise not to prejudge the author because he is the current Vice President of the United States. It is worth noting that when he wrote this book, he was far from imagining that he would pursue a political career, eventually rising to one of the highest offices in the world.
J.D. Vance was a lawyer among many successfully practicing law in America when he wrote this book, seeking to accurately and sincerely portray the background of that segment of the population where he was born and lived until completing his undergraduate studies and being admitted to Yale University.
Hillbilly Elegy is a pasionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis –that of poor, white Americans. The disintegration of this Rust Belt group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm but has never before been written about as scaringly from the inside with such a broad and probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. In Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hanging around your neck.
The Vance family story begins 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, one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his 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 how someone who never gives up or lets himself be crushed by the circumstances of the environment where he lives can reach very far. On the other hand, 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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