Ratings216
Average rating3.5
"Vance, a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, provides an 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 decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm. 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 their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance's grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, 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 so characteristic of their part of America."--Publisher's description.
Reviews with the most likes.
Read the last 80% of this book in a single afternoon. It was overall a quick, compelling read, but I only award it 4 stars because it felt rough at times, like it had been unedited.
This book is being promoted and reviewed as one explanation for Trump's popularity this election cycle. It is not that, at least not directly. It is a simply-narrated memoir of Vance's 30 years growing up and ultimately “escaping” his Appalachian hillbilly origins. I say escaping in quotes because one never really can escape one's past - and Vance touches on this fact (reminding me of the biography of Robert Peace I read earlier this year). Along with the very real presence of a drug-addict mother who is still in his life, the constant disruptions in his childhood left him with very real emotional trauma and overdeveloped stress reactions to situations that other people would handle calmly.
Again, this is not a book about the presidential race or Donald Trump, but rather a depiction of the cultural, social, and economic problems facing a certain group of working-class whites in our country today, which might help us understand the current political landscape. Vance weaves in statistics gleaned from social science research throughout his writing, but the book succeeds on the strength of its narrative. He writes about his family members in a very nuanced way that shows maturity - no one is either completely a hero or a villain.
Surprisingly, the best parts of the book are his grandparents - his Mamaw and Papaw. It's not the stories of the craziness and chaos of the world he grew up in that will stick with me, but rather the efforts of two far-from-perfect individuals to provide a safe space for his life and set him on a track to rise above the situation of his family.
The lessons in the book resist easy government policy fixes. Vance himself doesn't spend many pages trying to offer solutions, and he admits that he doesn't have many ideas. He skewers liberals for wanting to provide more welfare, more social support, saying that many of the people he met had plenty of opportunity to participate in the economy but chose instead to quit their jobs and blame Obama. One anecdote that really stuck with me is a young Vance, looking at the line-item on his taxes remarking that he was forced by the government to buy his neighbor T-Bone steaks via welfare when he himself would never have spent money on that. He also rips the right for not encouraging people to engage with society - for stirring up broad cultural anger without directing attention at anything positive. He laments the lack of an American role model in society for his kind of people - Barack Obama is too much a product of the elite to connect with these people in the way that Bill Clinton or George Bush did, and there are no astronauts or military leaders like in decades past. Our society now worships “elites”, and this has left the working class feeling like the communal fabric is coming apart. (This is the setup for Trump - a charismatic, strong leader preaching old-school values)
The book could have been tightened up a bit. There were a number times Vance introduced an idea and never followed up on it, dropping themes and threads that seemed like they would be interesting. I wish there had been a more consistent direction to the book - it felt like the only thing tying the whole memoir together was the linear passage of time. Still, a great read and a great reminder of how insulating it can be to grow up a member of the coastal elite and how easy it is to dismiss whole classes of people whom you don't even know.
I started a review of this book, but it stalled out for a while. After the Washington Post opinion piece and Ta-Nehisi Coates's Atlantic essay, I feel like it's a good time to talk about it.
What worked for me: Vance has a good deal of self-awareness regarding the hillbilly aspect of his background. He offers details unflattering to him and his family, increasing his credibility in my eyes. He offers another perspective that is at times baffling to me (“As a child, I associated accomplishments in school with femininity”), but useful to know exists. As a teacher, I did appreciate Vance's insight into how difficult it is for kids to have success in school when their home lives are working against what the school is trying to do.
Vance became a conservative in part, I infer, from seeing social welfare being abused. While in the big scheme of things, a century's worth of misused food stamps is completely dwarfed by the amount of money illegally and immoral taken by wealthy financiers a decade ago in the lead-up to and aftermath of the financial crisis, I think the lesson is this: perception of fairness matters. When I used to work retail, at a time when people had physical food stamps (like currency), a person might come in and make several transactions buying 25 cent bags of Cheetos with the $1 food stamp bill. Any change under $1 was returned to the customer in regular coins, not food stamps. A few transactions like this, and the person would buy cigarettes. From me, the same clerk who sold all the Cheetos. Now rationally, a few bucks misused isn't making much of a different in the U.S. budget, but the observer of the person abusing the food stamp system is not reacting rationally, and I think advocates for the poor need to keep that in mind.
Eyebrow-raising things in the conservative world of this book: he alludes to future wife Usha behaving like an “Ayn Rand heroine” as if we're all familiar with what that is. He cites Bell Curve author Charles Murray (mentioned in Coates's essay, not in a positive way) as a source of wisdom. “Fox News...has always told the truth about Obama's citizenship status and religious views,” write Vance. (Rebuttal from Media Matters.)
As Coates described, it's all about race. And yet, Vance appears to embrace a “color blind” philosophy. He is definitely not woke, to use the parlance of our times. “[Obama] conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him,” says Vance. “Holy shit” reads my note on the highlight of this quote. This isn't just turning a blind eye to the effect of race, it's actively asserting, essentially, that racism is not a thing in modern America. His description of meeting his future wife, Usha, raised my eyebrow. Never in the book does it mention her race or ethnicity. (She's Indian-American.) His immediate obsession (“After a few weeks of flirtations and a single date, I told her that I was in love with her. It violated every rule of modern dating I'd learned as a young man, but I didn't care.”) with her combined with her non-white name creates a story in my mind of a naive white man falling hard for the “exotic” (“She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly” writes Vance) woman. Not sure how he knows her a year before finding out she's single.
“[Obama] feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color,” says Vance. Ta-Nehisi Coates begs to differ.
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