Hillbilly Elegy
A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
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4.2 • 60 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Hillbilly Elegy recounts J.D. Vance's powerful origin story...
From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate now serving as a U.S. Senator from Ohio and the Republican Vice Presidential candidate for the 2024 election, an incisive 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.
THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
"You will not read a more important book about America this year."—The Economist
"A riveting book."—The Wall Street Journal
"Essential reading."—David Brooks, New York Times
Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this 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 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 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 it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Author J.D. Vance makes no attempt to sugarcoat the stark realities of poverty in both rural Appalachia—where his family hails from—and the Rust Belt town in Ohio where he grew up. Vance’s young life was grim, unstable, and often violent; he speaks frankly about his mother's opiate addiction and the reckless cast of characters that surrounded him. Vance sets aside the idea of structural poverty to explore the traditionally held beliefs (or "hillbilly culture”) that keep many rural and suburban whites from achievement and financial security. Whether or not you agree with his theories, you'll admire his blunt exploration of an often taboo topic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this compelling hybrid of memoir and sociological analysis, Vance digs deep into his upbringing in the hills of Jackson, Ky., and the suburban enclave of Middletown, Ohio. He chronicles with affection and raw candor the foibles, shortcomings, and virtues of his family and their own attempts to live their lives as working-class people in a middle-class world. Readers get to know his tough-as-nails grandmother, Mawmaw, who almost killed a man when she was 12 in Jackson, but who has to live among the sewing circles of Middletown. Her love for children, and for her grandson in particular, fuels her dream to become a children's attorney. When Vance finishes high school, he's not ready to head off to Ohio State, so Vance joins the Marines, completes a tour of duty in Iraq, and returns home with a surer sense of what he wants out of life and how to get it. He eventually enrolls in Yale Law School and becomes a successful lawyer, doggedly reflecting on the keys to his own success family and community and the ways they might help him understand the issues at stake in social policies today. Vance observes that hillbillies like himself are helped not by government policy but by community that empowers them and extended family who encourages them to take control of their own destinies. Vance's dynamic memoir takes a serious look at class.
Customer Reviews
Honest, Illuminating Self Reflection
The self awareness and the ability to describe with such clarity and honesty the difficulties of a childhood of property, family disintegration and abandonment. The author holds a mirror up to his white working middle class culture and examines it from both sides, recognizing its gifts and its challenges with eloquence. A survivor who looks back with love, yet carries the burden of his childhood scars to this day and recognizes them for the struggles they still represent. The timing of this book helps explain in an indirect way the pent up anger of the US electorate that led to the Trump election. A compelling read. An amazing first book. And a triumph of the human spirit.
Ok as a first person account of what happened in America’s Heartland
The author, a young man, who was a victim of the economic forces unleashed as a result of the bipartisan neoliberal revolution started by Reagan, shares his story of growing up in a family who once where solidly “respectable working class” deteriorate into drug addiction, family breakdown and economic insecurity. His story is a half decently written first person account of what happens to families and society when steady work evaporates and there is nothing to take it’s place. The author, despite his shaky disadvantaged start in life, manages quite a magnificent rise from his humble rust belt roots graduating from Yale Law School...... his main theme is is if you work hard enough, you too can still make it to the top...... he cites his family members and friend’s personal failings and sloth habits as reasons for their disadvantaged circumstances ...... while obviously there is some validity to his analysis..... it’s not very well thought out as he fails to notice subtle nuances and changing norms of “acceptable behaviour”..... he’s very critical of his mother’s drug addiction and how it ends her career as a nurse.... but ignores his grandfather’s alcoholism and criminal behaviour....... his mother loses her job because her behaviour; his grandfather is never held accountable for his behaviour and continues to keep his well paying blue collar job with benefits and thus able to maintain their lifestyle despite his personal failings.....someone with a top drawer Ivy League education should have developed better critical thinking skills and not fall for that tiresome “Ayn Rand” trope......