“Hillbilly Elegy” is a powerful work by J.D. Vance, a former Marine and Yale Law School graduate. The book recounts the author’s upbringing in a poor Rust Belt town while offering a broader, penetrating look at the struggles of America’s white working class.
This is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis – that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this demographic group, occurring over the past 40 years, has been increasingly reported with growing alarm. However, never before has it been described so incisively from an insider’s perspective. J.D. Vance tells the true story of what it feels like to be born into and grow up amid social, regional, and class decline.
The Vance family story begins hopefully in post-war America. J.D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor but deeply in love,” migrating from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in hopes of escaping dire poverty. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandson (the author) graduated from Yale Law School – a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility.
However, as the family saga in “Hillbilly Elegy” unfolds, we realize this is only the tip of the iceberg. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and especially 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 characteristic of their region. Vance poignantly shows that he himself still carries the “demons” from his chaotic family history.
“Hillbilly Elegy” is a deeply moving memoir, blending humor with vividly colorful characters. It’s the story of how upward mobility truly feels. At the same time, it serves as an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country’s population.
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