Hillbilly Elegy

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From Donald Trump's 2024 Vice-Presidential Candidate

‘Essential reading for this moment in history’ New York Times

‘Brilliant … offers an acute insight into the reasons voters have put their trust in Trump’ Observer

J. D. Vance grew up in the hills of Kentucky. His family and friends were the people most of the world calls rednecks, hillbillies or white trash.

In this deeply moving memoir, Vance tells the story of his family’s demons and of America’s problem with generational neglect. How his mother struggled against, but never fully escaped, the legacies of abuse, alcoholism, poverty and trauma. How his grandparents, ‘dirt poor and in love’, gave everything for their children to chase the American dream. How Vance beat the odds to graduate from Yale Law School. And how America came to abandon and then condescend to its white working classes, until they reached breaking point.

‘A beautiful memoir but it is equally a work of cultural criticism about white working-class America … Vance offers a compelling explanation for why it’s so hard for someone who grew up the way he did to make it … a riveting book’ Wall Street Journal

** Now a major-motion picture directed by Ron Howard and starring Amy Adams, Glenn Close, and Gabriel Basso **

Reviews

‘Brilliant … offers an acute insight into the reasons voters have put their trust in Trump’ Observer

‘Powerful and highly readable account of the light of the poor white Americans in Kentucky’ Financial Times

‘Essential reading for all yankophiles, politicians and anyone interested in how Donald Trump won over the rust belt to arrive at the White House’ Books of the Year, Sunday Times

‘The memoir gripping America … Vividly articulates the despair and disillusionment of blue-collar America’ Sunday Times

‘A tough-edged elegy for ‘white trash’ hillbilly America’ David Aaronovitch, The Times

‘America’s political system and the white working class have lost faith in each other. ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ offers a starkly honest look at what that shattering of faith feels like for a family who lived through it. You will not read a more important book about America this year’ Economist

‘Vance’s description of the culture he grew up in is essential reading for this moment in history’ David Brooks, New York Times

‘Clear-eyed and nuanced, a powerful antidote to the clamour of news’ The Times

‘With exquisite timing Vance’s ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ offers something profound at this time of political populism … a great insight into Trump and Brexit’ Ian Birrell, Independent

‘I bought this to try to better understand Trump’s appeal to those white working-class people who feel left behind, but the memoir is so much more than that … It’s an important social history/commentary but also a gripping, unputdownable page-turner’ India Knight, Evening Standard