J. D. Vance

THE INTERNATIONAL AND SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE ‘The political book of the year’ Sunday Times ‘You will not read a more important book about America this year’ Economist

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

Matthew Royal

A compassionate, modern update to the hillbilly stereotype. This is a useful book, not because it slices apart race from economics and culture, and not because it's a well-written lyric masterpiece (which it does and it is not), but because it yields a new way of thinking about problems in our education and economic systems, and because it helped me find a pattern in some of the stories shaken from my own family tree.

Hillbilly culture is an honor culture, and defending the family honor goes with hiding the family's problems. The ineffectual treatment of those problems by well-meaning family members helps create a cycle of failure, dependency, and despair. It's this despair of learned helplessness, where someone believes no matter what he does, his fate is sealed and no decision or action can effect improvement in his life, that Vance attributes to the dysfunction and resentment building in his "hill people." 

Vance's way out was a family network that provided stability in high school, the Marine Corps, which filled in the gaps in his practical education and life philosophy, and attending Ohio State and later Yale Law. He observes that the people he grew up with rarely enter his new ivy league circle because they didn't know the right choices to make, and didn't have access to the social capital of people who weren't as poor as them. I would have liked more guided application of his insights, but he is still too young and close to things -- looking forward to seeing other responses to this book.

Ilia Markov

Very interesting and very well-written. Author’s politics are probably very different from mine, but I found myself agreeing with much of what he has to say.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

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