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

by J. D. Vance

Paperback, 2018

Status

Available

Description

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.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member jnwelch
I thought Hillbilly Elegy was very good, and recommend it as important reading in connection with the recent U.S. election. There is a large bloc of working class whites who have grown disenchanted with the Democrats, and who voted for Reagan and Trump. The Democrat's failure to appreciate that
Show More
group's importance and to speak effectively to it has hurt the country, and the failure to do more to try to help that damaged group is unsupportable.

Vance grew up a hillbilly, and became a Marine and a Yale law grad. He's now a principal at a Silicon Valley investment firm. How unusual is that?! He has a remarkable personal story to tell, but it's his understanding and insight into the social context that sets this book apart. I was struck, for example, by his pointing out that, even apart from race, Obama is nothing like this group, and that the white working class couldn't relate to him. Highly educated, professorial, belonging to what the WWC folks consider an elite apart from them, the challenges he overcame to get there made no difference. The same with Hillary.

Here's an excerpt from the NY Times review of the book:

"Now, along comes Mr. Vance, offering a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass that has helped drive the politics of rebellion, particularly the ascent of Donald J. Trump. Combining thoughtful inquiry with firsthand experience, Mr. Vance has inadvertently provided a civilized reference guide for an uncivilized election, and he’s done so in a vocabulary intelligible to both Democrats and Republicans."

It's well worth your reading time.
Show Less
LibraryThing member lit_chick
2016, Harper Audio, Read by J.D. Vance

Publisher’s Summary: from Audible.com
From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful 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.

Hillbilly Elegy is a
Show More
passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis - that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over 40 years, has been reported on 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.

My Review:
I thoroughly enjoyed Hillbilly Elegy from several points of view: sociologically, educationally, and personally.

Sociologically, the novel is an intimate portrait of a social class in decline. I am a firm believer that no number of textbooks can explain the reasons for such a decline as can one who has lived it first-hand. And certainly, a true account of what that experience feels like must come from “inside.” Vance writes: “Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.” Both as an educator, and personally, Vance’s exploration into Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), and the decades-long affect such trauma has on children is invaluable. Again, no textbook can explain or enlighten as can one who has lived the ordeal. Highly recommended reading!

Powerful Quotes:
-“I want people to understand how upward mobility really feels. And I want people to understand something I learned only recently: that for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us.”
-“social mobility isn’t just about money and economics, it’s about a lifestyle change. The wealthy and the powerful aren’t just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different set of norms and mores. When you go from working-class to professional-class, almost everything about your old life becomes unfashionable at best or unhealthy at worst.”
-“We do know that working-class Americans aren’t just less likely to climb the economic ladder, they’re also more likely to fall off even after they’ve reached the top. I imagine that the discomfort they feel at leaving behind much of their identity plays at least a small role in this problem. One way our upper class can promote upward mobility, then, is not only by pushing wise public policies but by opening their hearts and minds to the newcomers who don’t quite belong.”
-“whenever people ask me what I’d most like to change about the white working class, I say, “The feeling that our choices don’t matter.”
-“For kids like me, the part of the brain that deals with stress and conflict is always activated ... We are constantly ready to fight or flee, because there is a constant exposure to the bear, whether that bear is an alcoholic dad or an unhinged mom … I see conflict and I run away or prepare for battle.”
Show Less
LibraryThing member EBT1002
"Powerful people sometimes do things to help people like me without really understanding people like me."

"...social mobility isn't just about money and economics, it's about a lifestyle change. The wealthy and the powerful aren't just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different set of norms and
Show More
mores. When you go from working-class to professional-class, almost everything about your old life becomes unfashionable at best or unhealthy at worst. At no time was this more obvious than the first (and last) time I took a Yale friend to Cracker Barrel. In my youth, it was the height of fine dining -- my grandma's and my favorite restaurant. With Yale friends, it was a greasy public health crisis."

I had not realized that this book, which has topped the reading lists of liberal intellectual circles for the past several months, was a memoir. I expected an academic treatise, a narrative nonfiction work of sociology. Instead, I got a very personal recounting of the life of a man born in southeast Kentucky and raised in Rust Belt Ohio by a poor and chaotic family. Vance is still in his early 30s so this is a memoir of youth. It is also an examination of the cultural dynamics of poor white "hillbillies," his own word for his extended family and their community.

One reason for the book's popularity is liberal intellectual Americans' desire to "understand" the results of the most recent election and the increasing divide between classes within our society. Vance does provide a glimpse into a culture steeped in loyalty and mistrust, deep patriotism and vilification of government, resentment of the rich and a reluctance to consider one's own contribution to stagnation. Vance explores these paradoxes with his own loyalty on his sleeve and this is one reason for the success of the work. He invites compassion and understanding, appreciation for the good in his people even as they abuse drugs or scream obscenities at one another, and an openness to solutions that focus less on schools, for example, and more on the family unit so crucial to a child's sense of security in the world.

It's not great literature, but it's a worthwhile read.
Show Less
LibraryThing member deusvitae
A story of the difficulties and culture of the Scots-Irish "hillbillies" of Appalachia as told by a native son who overcame and graduated from Yale Law.

The "elegy" is his own story, even though he is barely over 30; he is chronicling the fate of "hillbillies," the still robustly Scots-Irish that
Show More
settled in Appalachia and in two waves populated much of the Midwestern rust belt. His story features his grandparents' more stable presence in his life, the religious instruction from his father, and the embodiment of the trials of the white working class in his mother. He explains the trauma he experienced in his childhood because of domestic life, the respite he gained from his grandparents, and how he was one of the very few to overcome the toxic cycle of blame, despair, drugs, etc., that have plagued much of middle America.

In many respects he tells the story of how one escapes poverty; I have previously learned much from Ruby Payne's "Bridges Out of Poverty" seminar materials, and the author's story does well at giving a living example of the poverty class values and how one could learn to live among the wealthy class. He makes it clear that it wasn't intuitive and it required good people in his life who encouraged him and kept him going.

The book is absolutely worth all the accolades it is receiving. The author comes from a conservative perspective but is not aggressively dogmatic; he does well to show how both liberal explanations and solutions and conservative explanations and solutions may be true in part but miss the whole. He does well in showing that this is not a problem government can really fix; it must come from the willingness of the people themselves to believe, to aspire for better, and to turn pretense into reality and actually work like they claim to work.

I grew up in northern Illinois, a place with a slightly different culture, but have worked in areas in Ohio and can attest to the validity of that which the author speaks. A great resource to understand more about hillbilly culture.
Show Less
LibraryThing member jmchshannon
The best part of Hillbilly Elegy was learning about the town in which we lived for seven years in the 2010s. While we lived in Middletown, Ohio, we observed many things that were strange to us, biases we could never overcome, and attitudes towards life in general that baffled us. Mr. Vance provides
Show More
origins to those behaviors and attitudes that so confused us, and it is an eye-opening experience. He also confirms the severe economic downturn we witnessed as well as the general apathy towards life we saw so often in the townspeople. Having a reason for this does not help the situation, but it certain makes what we witnessed understandable.

While Mr. Vance’s memoir is enlightening, one should express caution before applying his lessons to an entire culture. After all, this is one man’s musings about his heritage – a man who no longer lives in the area and who is far removed from his former socio-economic status and that of his relatives. His is the exception to the rule, and his “lessons” on how hillbillies can improve their lots in life are overly simplistic and contingent on many of the same advantages and chances that he was able to grab.

Mr. Vance does make some excellent observations about the hillbilly culture and does explain to some extent how such a blue-collar society can support a political party that typically does not attract blue-collar voters. However, it is important to remember that Hillbilly Elegy is a memoir and nothing more. Any sociological observations are biased in the extreme and severely limited to his own experiences. While he sheds light on the Appalachian culture, it is not a serious study from which one can draw conclusions or apply conclusions to the entire culture. In fact, this is what Mr. Vance attempts to do but fails to remove his own bias and luck. The result is a book that is interesting but fails to provide any real insight into this very large and blighted area of America.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Slevyr26
...meh? I'm in that kind of purgatory where half of me thinks, Yes, his childhood was terrible and that is absolutely not J.D. Vance's fault, but the other half of me thinks, but he still somehow wrote a book that frequently came off to me as self-righteous and self-congratulatory.

Only in the very
Show More
last chapter does he admit that hillbilly culture needs to help itself, that it's not the government's fault or the fault of public policy that they consistently place among the poorest and least-educated American group of people. I felt the majority of the book was spent not overtly and blatantly blaming everyone else but very subtly hinting that it's not a hillbilly's fault that they're doomed from the start, it's just the way it is and it's the only thing they know. He very gently blamed his people for their shortcomings but then was very quick to defend them. Very, very quick. I just wanted to scream, "PICK ONE!"

According to Vance, hillbillies hate Barack and Michelle Obama because they are well-educated and had to overcome a different adversity (*cough racism cough*) to hillbilly adversity and grew up in a metropolis and that's apparently easier than a white hillbilly's Appalachian adversity... bullshit. Black inner-city children have just as many, if not more adversity to push through as white Rust-Belt hillbilly children. You're not going to convince me that you had it worse but that they came out better than you and that's why you resent a successful black man and woman. Do hillbillies resent successful white men and women who are doctors and lawyers and bankers for rising up making themselves successful? What a gigantic cop-out.

"We hate Michelle Obama's healthy eating programs for children not because we disagree with her ideas but because we know she's right." Suuuuuuuuuuuuuure. These black people worked harder and did more to advance themselves than you did, you resent it because even white hillbillies have unjustified white privilege and that's the long and short of it. Vance conveniently skirted around the racism issue of middle-American white people.

I found the story in itself to be fascinating; the habits and rituals and customs of a group of people that I'm not at all familiar with. That's what kept me reading, not J.D. Vance's personal story, truly. You can only say that you're not an asshole so many times before somehow it just doesn't ring true. The well-written history and overall interesting subject matter is what helped me give this a solid three stars.
Show Less
LibraryThing member msf59
“I am a hill person. So is much of America’s white working class. And we hill people aren’t doing very well….Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.”

Vance grew up poor in southeastern Ohio and eastern Kentucky. He was raised
Show More
mostly by his grand parents, largely his grandmother (Mamaw) who was a guiding force in keeping J.D. from the fate of many young men, in these hard-scrabble regions. Many of the same things we see in our inner-city “ghettos” happen here too: rampant drug/alcohol abuse, poor education, crime, joblessness and of course hopelessness and anger.
J.D. survived school and entered the Marines. This transformed his life and he went on to college and then to Yale Law School.
This is a timely and beautifully written memoir, filled with humor, grief, pain and insight. It also looks at the reasons why the white working class supports the GOP:

“There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.”

This makes a perfect companion piece to White Trash, which I read awhile back, although that book has flaws, this one does not.
Show Less
LibraryThing member bikesandbooks
First and foremost JD Vance is an excellent story teller. His memoir is compelling on his merits and the personable narration reflects his interesting life. I looked forward to reading each chapter and couldn’t wait to find out what happened next, even though I knew he would prevail -- because he
Show More
did prevail. I rooted for him to prevail. Vance’s book is a memoir, for sure.

But to get one recurring thought out of the way, if you don’t know or haven’t known hillbillies as Vance describes them, then perhaps you should get out more. Go meet some. Hillbillies are everywhere, even if they don’t cotton to the name, “hillbilly”. Meanwhile, don’t mistake this book as a passable substitute for meeting a hillbilly; or a field guide to the common thoughts, actions, and wisdom of the American Hillbilly in native habitat. This book is a story about J.D. Vance’s life. Period.

That said, the marketers and publishers did a great job of hyping the book. The groundswell of promotion leads one to believe this book explains Trump, Trump's supporters, the rise of nationalism, populism, and the next wave of fundamentalist protectionism. It doesn’t. Don’t buy this book if that’s what you hope to learn. (And If that is what you think you learned reading this book, you learned nothing of the sort.) The book is an authentic and compelling personal story of and by a poor kid raised in an inconsistent environment. The prose flows like water. The story is interesting and at times compelling.

The next thing to take issue with is the title. Maybe the spin-promoters had a bit too much influence over the book title, but the title is misleading. Fortunately I can think of at least three more descriptive titles. _Hillbilly Apologist_ comes to mind; although Vance is more of a creator than apologist; creating his own idealized, self-defined Hillbilly subcultural ethnography -- albeit in a drastically limited use of the term Hillbilly since his description of Appalachia is expressly limited to the northern extremities of Appalachia and doesn’t quite resonate with Southern or New South definitions. (Vance references the South, once or twice. I know Kentucky and West Virginia and even the southern bit of Ohio hew close to or are legitimately south of the Mason Dixon line. But I’m just telling you, the regionalism is strong in this book -- a bit too strong, given the hype.) Another title option might be _Redneck Crybaby_ -- I’m sure I am not the only reader to find the whole “woe my life was hard because my people were poor” refrain to have gotten a bit tiresome by the end of the book. Lastly, let me suggest a title in the long-winded style of 18th century publishing: _How I mostly overcame xenophobic induced instability_ by escaping the bad influences of my family -- even though I think some people in my family aren’t all bad -- and even though my hillbilly brethren are tough, irascible, kinda lazy, and preternaturally lunk-headed -- but don’t call hillbillies lazy because you’re not like me since you didn’t grow up the way I grew up. by J.D. Vance, Esq.

The last point to make is the first one Vance makes in the opening sentence. This book is absurd. It’s absurd that a thirty-year-old would write a memoir. The author’s notions of class surfing are absurdly explained while cleverly grounded in cherry picked authoritative summaries of more serious explanations. A real life, modernized Horatio Alger tale is interesting even while its implications are no more applicable today than they were in the early nineteenth century. Vance’s anecdotes are good entertainment.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Opinionated
The cynical reader might wonder why a 31 year old would be inspired to write what is essentially an autobiography, especially if that 31 year old works for Peter Thiel (a fact that is only evident from the acknowledgments, and not from the text). Perhaps its to lay the foundation for a political
Show More
career? Mr Vance certainly has the backstory to follow that path, should he wish to.

As a rags to riches affirmation of the American Dream, the book is compelling enough. Mr Vance has a difficult childhood, with an absent real father, but constantly rotating father figures from the many marriages and liaisons of his mother, who has substance abuse and mental health issues. He is essentially raised by his no nonsense, tough as old boots grandmother and his older sister. He graduates high school, if only just, and makes a decision to join the Marines rather that go to college.

Up to this point, the story is interesting. Vance is self deprecating (perhaps a little too much so at times) seemingly honest about his own failings and those of family members, and he has a decent sense of humour. Despite the books title, though, this is really about a family in crisis and there is really relatively little discussion of hillbilly culture. We learn that large shambolic families are the norm , protecting the honour of your family with violence is expected, and that bad decisions come from bad options (which is hardly unique to hillbillies). Mr Vance makes sweeping generalisations about "the white working class" and whilst some of his conclusions seem fair enough, it is unclear how he has arrived at them. For example, he is probably right that some people who blame the government or society for their misfortunes might be better advised to look at their own poor choices; but how and when did a culture of self reliance turn into a culture of blame? He is undoubtedly right that many people no longer trust mainstream media. But why don't they? Why do they think they are being lied to? He is disingenuous on the reasons for President Obama's unpopularity in the rustbelt. He blames it on the fact that Mr Obama looks cultured and well spoken, and wears a suit to work. Err yes. But so did President Bush wear a nice suit and the rustbelt had no issue voting for him. It seems that Mr Vance does not consider the possibility that race might have something to do with it, perhaps not in his own family (although the fact that one of his cousins is disowned by her family for giving birth to a black baby would seem to give lie to that) but certainly in general

Mr Vance joins the Marines because he believes he is not ready for college - and here the story gets less interesting. The armed forces teach him self discipline (mainly through the medium of shouting at him it seems) and how to be an adult. He goes to Iraq, but not in a fighting role. Somehow, and this is not explained, he has morphed into being in the Marines PR department rather than being a grunt. He leaves the Marines, churns through Ohio State University at double speed despite holding down 2 or 3 jobs, goes to Yale and from there has it made. He has some amusing anecdotes to tell about hillbilly social faux pas in the cultured Ivy League world but that's about it

So what do we take out from this? Mr Vance's story, at least until he leaves Middletown, Ohio, is interesting enough and is worth reading. His comments on hillbilly, or white working class, culture are probably correct but not particularly illuminating. His solution? He doesn't really have any (which is fair enough, these are hardly simple problems) other than a return to self help, self reliance, a strong role for the church, and you suspect (although Mr Vance doesn't overtly say it) a return to national service. What these directionless young people need, you suspect he believes, is a good dose of being shouted at by a drill sergeant. Its a point of view anyway
Show Less
LibraryThing member Beamis12
Possibly the most timely read of the year, here in the United States. Not just a sociological view of this group of people I had heard nor read little about, but the experiences of a young man raised in this environment and pulled himself out, though he does acknowledge to receiving much help along
Show More
the way. This book enlightens the reader about the huge disparity in thinking between those making the leas and those receiving the benefits of these laws, which probably hinder more than help. His story, his journey is inspirational, his thoughts provoking, and his story clear, concise and well told. The working class is seriously under represented in this country, and lack of knowledge and insight is a huge factor in why this has happened. Learned helplessness, a very good term and one it is hard to disagree with.

He makes it clear that he loves his family, warts and all but his special connection and the help he received from his memaw was priceless. She was his saving grace. Some of his family members, an aunt, his sister, have broken the chain of drug use, alcoholism, many partners in and out, as they both have long marriages behind them. Vance does go into some sociological aspects, explains the exodus of many from his small Kentucky town to Ohio, jobs offered by the new steel mill being the draw, the problems those who moved away from their families experienced. All in all this is a very informative book, Vance's story both harrowing and touching in turns.
Show Less
LibraryThing member pamelad
Vance's family has been poor for generations. In Kentucky the Vances and their neighbours were miners, sharecroppers and labourers; they worked hard in badly paid jobs. They left school early, had children in their teens, and struggled to survive. There was too much booze, too much violence and not
Show More
enough food. When jobs opened up in Ohio in the manufacturing industries, many people left Kentucky for a better life. Vance's relatives, like many others, maintained their links to their families in Kentucky, visiting regularly. They created a Kentuckian diaspora in the industrial towns of Ohio. These are the people Vance calls hillbillies: working class people of Scots-Irish descent, generations removed from the hills of Appalachia but, as Vance would have it, bound by the hillbilly code of God, family, patriotism and violence.

I read this book hoping for an insight into the results of the presidential election, but I was disappointed. Vance, at the age of thirty-one, wrote a memoir that describes how he escaped the poverty, addiction and despair of his upbringing to graduate from Harvard Law School, find a good job, and marry a good woman. These days he is a Republican who believes that the poor are too dependent on welfare. Yes, he has escaped his upbringing. Is that success?

I enjoyed the first half of this book, but the author's self-congratulation began to annoy me. Then I ran up against a burst of patriotism and had to struggle to finish. (When Americans go on about the greatest country in the world I am revolted. I doubt that I am alone.) Vance's book does not live up to its reviews.
Show Less
LibraryThing member villemezbrown
Interesting but not engrossing. The author seems to make a lot of generalizations from anecdotal evidence, but then, don't we all.

The day I finished this book, I also read the first 100 pages of [book:Between the World and Me|25489625], and boy does Hillbilly Elegy suffer in comparison. There are
Show More
similarities in themes and other elements as the two writers examine the struggles of their respective cultures from their personal experience, but the power of Coates' prose blows Vance out of the water.
Show Less
LibraryThing member streamsong
Author J.D. Vance's family roots are deep in the hills of Kentucky. But when jobs became scarce, generations of his family and their neighbors moved out of the hills and into the Middleton Ohio area for mill jobs.

They brought with them many of their customs and beliefs.

These were fiercely
Show More
independent people. They brought with them a strong sense of family – but unfortunately this sometimes included broken families, addictions and child abuse. Many of them had lived in abject poverty, but refused government help which would have given their children a better chance at education and life. They looked down on those receiving such help.

They also looked down on government regulations.

One incident that I found both amusing and enlightening was that of one family bringing a few chickens into their city backyard. A neighbor was appalled at seeing chickens butchered outside her window. A zoning board got involved and chickens were outlawed in the 'burbs. The relatives' reaction? “#?#Xing zoning board stay out of my life.”

This book is included in The New York Times list of 'Six Books to Help you Understand Trumps's Win' which was published in November of 2016.

Will I ever understand Trump's supporters? Probably not, but this is an interesting description of the evolution of some of their populist views.
Show Less
LibraryThing member wb4ever1
This book has been the thing to talk about in political circles, especially progressive ones, for the past year; regretfully, I am a little late in getting around to reading it, but J.D. Vance’s short memoir is well worth the time. His chronicle of how he endured the dysfunction of growing up in
Show More
a “hillbilly” family in Kentucky and southern Ohio and then ultimately achieving an Ivy League education at Yale and a law degree that will guarantee him a life far beyond the limited horizons of his forbearers. This book also presents an insider’s view of a genuine American subculture, that of the Scotch-Irish of Appalachia, a blood line that spread across much of the Old South, especially the mountains and hollers of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky. Many would drift north in the mid 20th Century to find work in the factories of the industrial mid-west, taking their “hillbilly” ways with them. These were proud and contentious people who lived what outsiders would consider a hopelessly insular life, revolving around family, work and church.

J.D. was born in 1984, after the end of the great post World War II boom that gave jobs to men like his grandfather in the Armco plant in Middletown, Ohio. Though they had achieved an outwardly middle class life, J.D.’s grandparents could never escape the worst aspects of the culture they came from, especially a tendency to fight and argue at even the slightest hint of disrespect and a distrust of strangers, not being the least among them; constant abuse of alcohol was another deadly trait. When the economic decline took hold, the lives of many in the working class would become filled with anger and apprehension, with drugs, alcohol and casual violence became the main forms of relief from this malaise. Young J.D.’s mother drifted from one relationship to another as her substance abuse problems worsened, while his father was not part of his life. But he had a rock to lean on in the persons of his mother’s parents, Mamaw and Papaw Vance, who gave him the love and stability to not only endure his rough environment, but ultimately, to rise above it. After high school, he did a stint in the Marine Corp, where he gained the discipline and focus to apply to the Yale School of Law.

J.D. Vance is wonderfully candid about his early life, and his retelling of events and portraits of his family are spot on and unforgettable; Mamaw Vance is one of the most vivid characters I have met in any book –fiction included – in the past year. His honest, blow by blow accounts of family dysfunction, like his mother’s repeated meltdowns, can be painful to read, but it’s impossible not to turn the page. Also impressive is J.D.’s honesty in how terribly unprepared he was life in the world of upward social mobility, when he had not the slightest idea how to dress for a job interview with a recruiters from big law firms or even how to use a salad fork.

But what has won this book so much renown is the picture it creates of, as the book cover says, “a culture in crisis.” This is the culture of working class America that has taking a beating ever since the Reagan era when the steel mills and manufacturing plants began moving overseas in search of cheap labor; and the jobs that didn’t move away were threatened by automation. We get a picture of a community plagued with underemployment and low wage service jobs, where opportunities for a better life lies elsewhere, yet where most refuse to make to effort at a better life, clinging to the old and the familiar, even as it drags them down. J.D. makes it clear that this poverty is a state of mind, a culture of “learned hopelessness,” where everyone believes that there is nothing they can do to improve their circumstances; that the system is against them, and always will be. His life refutes this belief, but he makes it clear that it takes people like his grandparents to give children the stability and love of learning necessary to the have the self confidence – as opposed to self esteem – to make something of themselves. This is a change which must come from within; there is no government program or tax cut for the rich that will impose it from the outside. It’s a brutally honest assessment that flies in the face of the orthodoxies of many sincere liberals and conservatives.

I found myself agreeing with many of J.D.’s observations, such as how many working class Americans became disenchanted with the party FDR and JFK when it became associated with welfare and food stamps; how many in working class America felt that Obama was the embodiment of the Ivy League elitists who had been looking down on them since forever; how comments like “clinging to their religion and guns” was like spit in the face. I have many experiences in my own life that would back this up, and proves that not all the problems between Democrats and the white working class is a matter of racism. J.D. is a conservative, but he is clearly no member of the Tea Party, a rare political person capable of objective reasoning. He makes it plain that there is a role for government in improving the lives of the people of Appalachia, but that bureaucracy and arbitrary rules often make it ineffective.

I’ve seen on more than one online review of HILLBILLY ELEGY by readers like me on such sights as Amazon, Goodreads and Librarything, many of them having come from the same part of the country as the author or from a similar background. Some of them heartily agree with him, others take him to task for being too dismissive of blue collar workers and over estimating the benefits of college and a professional life – that those successful families have more than little of the same “hillbilly” dysfunction in them. Others dislike his insistence that it is solely on the individual to improve his circumstances, that no one can do it all on their own. Many readers relate real life experiences that either affirm or deny J.D. assertions. This is what a real discussion looks like, and it is being done in a polite, but vigorous manner, and not like one of those “national conversations” that politicians are always talking about, the kind where one side lectures and hectors the other; where no one learns anything.

I do wonder what the progressives who champion this book so much will ultimately get out of it? Do they think this explains why Trump beat Clinton so badly among the white working class? Will they stop being so condescending when they say that the white working class always “votes against their interests?” If it makes them realize that change cannot be made by a bunch of well meaning “experts” in a room in Washington D.C. and then imposed from the top down; that culture is more than an affinity for the Confederate flag, pickup trucks, and desire to listen to Toby Keith. If so, then maybe they might learn something. But I doubt it.

Back around 2006, I heard a young DeeJay on a Northern Virginia/Washington D.C. talk radio station refer to the young men and women fighting in Iraq as “dopey kids,” bamboozled by military recruiters. He could make this observation, he said, because he was a recent college graduate and listened to a lot of rap and hip hop, which meant he knew what was really going on the world. Among those so-called “dopey kids” serving his country in Iraq at that time was J.D. Vance. Not long after, that DeeJay was fired, and never heard from again. We know what happened to J.D.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Eyejaybee
J.D Vance has pulled off a major coup, succeeding in combining in one compact volume a dazzling personal memoir detailing the challenges he faced growing up among America’s white poor in the Appalachians and a socio-economic history of that community that had its own complicated code of honour.
Show More


Vance’s own story has more than a few shades of a modern fairy tale. He was raised by his disorganised and dysfunctional mother who passed through a series of ever more bitterly failing relationships before subsiding into severe substance abuse (largely involving prescription drugs). Fortunately for Vance, his maternal grandparents were generally close at hand, as was his elder sister, and between them they were able to shield Vance from the worst of the fallout from his mother’s implosion. Rising above all of this, he secured a place at Yale, graduating from its Law School.

Dreadful things happen to Vance’s family, but he does not succumb to self-pity. Neither is this book a form of auto-hagiography. He is not scared to recount some of his own failings alongside those of other members of his family. What does emerge, however, is a core of familial devotion within Vance’s extended relatives that was strong enough to transcend the privations ranged against him.

While relating his experiences, Vance also analyses the widespread Appalachian or hillbilly community, and mourns the industrial desert that much of the rustbelt has become. The demise of paternalistic employers such as Armco Steel has left a huge gap in the welfare landscape.

Altogether a fascinating, brave and haunting book.
Show Less
LibraryThing member dcoward
I have mixed feelings about this book. Some of the author's conclusions seem simplistic despite his obvious intelligence. His extreme devotion to his grandparents (despite their issues contributing to the addictions of his mother), and his idealization of his time as a marine all rubbed me the
Show More
wrong way. I did find his suggestion to help poverty that Section 8 or public housing be spread out so that there is not concentrated pockets of poverty to be a good idea, and his observation that this gave children the ability to see that life is not always just what they see at home an important one.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Othemts
This book is being touted as offering insight into the Trump voter, but I think if you go into the book with that mindset you will be misled. Nevertheless it is an interesting memoir of life for the self-proclaimed "hillbilly" culture of Appalachia. Vance tells the story of his family from rural
Show More
Kentucky and their migration along the "Hillbilly Highway" to a factory town in Ohio. His community is one of strong family ties, rugged independence, and fierce patriotism. But it is also a place of domestic violence, substance abuse, and extreme poverty. Vance's beloved grandmother, Mamaw, who primarily raised Vance is a key figure in the book. One of the most interesting political observations in the book is that Mamaw could alternately support right wing anti-government ideas and social democratic government programs. The contradiction of these seemingly extreme viewpoints is due to the fact the established middle of both Republicans and Democrats have abandoned the ordinary working people. Vance's story is not typical for an Appalachian person as he joins the Marines, studies at Ohio State, gets a law degree at Yale, and now works at an investment firm in Silicon Valley. A lot of Vance's book is the story of how he "got out" and doesn't reflect the perspectives of those unable to "get out" or those for whom "getting out" is not an option to be desired. With those caveats in mind, this is a good slice of life of part of our country and our people that are too often overlooked.
Show Less
LibraryThing member BillieBook
I started the audio book on this morning's commute, and it's simultaneously the best and worst choice for this day.

ETA: Meh. I don't get why all the fuss and bother about this book. It's not bad, but I don't feel like it was full of earth-shattering revelations or anything. I mean, I guess if you
Show More
grew up in an upper-middle class white world, there might be some new perspective to be gained into the lives of the lower-middle and lower classes. But. for me, the people described in these pages were neighbors and family and situations I knew from childhood. If you've ever eaten bologna sandwiches with ketchup because you're out of Miracle Whip, you can probably skip this one.
Show Less
LibraryThing member PattyLee
Yes, in some ways this is a powerful statement about the working poor in America, but it is also self-serving. The author escaped and went to Yale and, due to his connections there, found fame and wealth. Of course, he had to work hard and he did, but although his insight into what’s wrong is
Show More
telling, his solutions are typically conservative. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Grit it out. Save money. No mention that the government could help by offering opportunities or changing one element in a nasty cycle of drugs and poverty and ignorance and family disjunction. Very Ayn Randish. I thought he might turn out to have a great vision about how we can work together to solve our problems. Nope. Even though he mentions and admires the results of other countries( those with social welfare safety systems in place), he doesn’t seem to believe it would work here. I know this not from his book, but from being interested and reading what he is about these days. Really disappointing.
Show Less
LibraryThing member KamGeb
This was an AMAZING book and very timely. It really explains a lot about Trump and how middle America feels about situations. Also the book was very well written. The story just seemed to flow. I wonder, however, if the story will have the same impact if it is read 5 years from now when the whole
Show More
"how could Trump have won" phenomena has passed.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Razinha
Two people in two weeks urged me to read this, ostensibly to help me understand how an entire demographic could vote against its own interests, and maybe how the horror of 2016 could have come about. It accomplished neither. There's a story here that is hard and not hard to relate to. On the one
Show More
hand, as I am not from Appalachia (or where the transplants landed) I will never understand that which is Appalachia, that which Vance describes.

This may well be true, but on the other hand, I grew up in a similar small town in Connecticut... It really wasn't until I left that I realized how close to the poverty line we lived; hand-me-downs, hand-made clothes, Spam as a main dish... And I married someone whose family came from Kentucky (and where grew up quite close to Vance's Middletown, Ohio). I recall visiting relatives in Ocala in the late 1960s who still had an outhouse. And I know well the "Mamaw" and "Papaw" grandparents of Vance, though my wife's did not use the colorful language of Vance's Mamaw.

Where it is hard to relate is that I have never understood the provincial mindset, the allegiance to "roots". I have never understood regional loyalties, the "Southern way", hollers or kin. Once I left Connecticut, I had no intention of going back. The limits were suffocating, though I only felt them after I left, when I realized there was a much bigger world than our 1968 Encyclopedia Britannica (I have no idea how much debt my parents incurred to give us that incredible resource) shared with me.

So, this book paints a picture. A specific autobiographical picture, which should not be construed as indicative of all "hillbillies", but with commonalities too many can identify with. It did not explain to me why the people described would vote for people who are clearly intuitively obvious to the most casual observer not representing them. The distinct lack of critical thinking does not mean lack of intelligence. But Vance himself notes how people refuse to believe the truth, or worse, believe untruths despite being shown the truth, and I can't abide willful ignorance.

Maybe this was too close for comfort. Too real. Memories of a distanced family. Memories of a small town life consciously, and with deliberate intent, left behind long ago. But I have always held that it is a moral imperative to improve oneself - if not one's lot in life, then at least intellectually - in spite of one's environment. Vance made something of himself. This is good. But he admits to heroes that tells me he stopped short.
Show Less
LibraryThing member bohannon
I bought this at the very tail end of July, because of one interview I read with Mr. Vance... then after reading another interview, I was hesitant to crack it open.

It sat on my end-table for almost three weeks before I picked it up to look at the intro before bed--just after 2130. I finished it
Show More
about 0230. This is what I wrote about it then:

My [Scot-Irish] Okie family isn't quite his Appalachian hillbilly--and thankfully, my southern part of southern CA was different than his Kentucky and Ohio.... but boy... wow. Things family and friends said and did, both helpful and nasty, could have been quotes from my own childhood; and, the weird issues of identity and transition with trying to move on and all that entails... just wow.
* * *
"...these problems of family, faith, and culture aren't like a Rubik's Cube, and I don't think that solutions (as most understand the term) really exist. A good friend, who worked for a time in the White House and cares deeply about the plight of the working class, once told me, 'The best way to look at this might be to recognize that you probably can't fix these things. They'll always be around. But maybe you can put your thumb on the scale a little for the people at the margins.'
"There were many thumbs put on my scale. When I look back at my life, what jumps out is how many variables had to fall in place in order to give me a chance... Remove any of these people from the equation, and I'm probably screwed. Other people who have overcome the odds cite the same sort of interventions." (p238)
* * *

Its been a few weeks since the blush of that initial inhalation of the book. As I've considered it, and reskimmed parts of it. There's a lot to be gleaned from the book: for me personally, for friends and family who don't come from that kind of world, and potentially for understanding at least part of the schisms currently causing all of us so many problems.

(2016 Review #17)
Show Less
LibraryThing member Narshkite
I have the feeling the reviewers who drooled over this have never had an actual conversation with an uneducated poor person. There is nothing in this book that was surprising or new to anyone who really listens to poor folk (Black, White, Brown, makes no difference). This is not a bad memoir at
Show More
all. I have nothing but respect for the hard work Vance did to pull himself out of the sucking swamp of anti intellectual, consumerist, reactive, street justice reality of the endemically poor. He went to a much better law school than I did. Vance is smart and has a unique and valuable POV. As our power brokers nearly all come from privilege, it is good to know that there in someone in the room to provide perspective on how many Americans actually live. His personal story has compelling elements and takes the belief that one person can change a life from the theoretical to the anecdotally supported.

Where this falls down is in the broader purpose of the book. The larger sociological statement here is absolutely pedestrian. Every step of Vance's analysis is completely obvious. The fact that yhis info is not known to many says a lot about economic segregation in this country. Another issue for me: Vance seems to miss the fact that most people don't have the internal or external resources to take positive responsibility. Bootstrap pulling is not an answer to these.problems. When hillbillies (or any other group plagued by generational poverty) go out and commit violent acts, scheme, drop out, join hate groups, fake disability to get money, etc. they are exercising personal responsibility, just not in a socially advantageous way. They see no other way of doing so. They can't all join the Marines. I don't have many answers, but I do know that most people have no good bootstraps to pull on. I also know that Vance's grandfather was able to work hard and support his family, and develop a sense of self-worth and the resources to help his grandchildren. Due to wage compression the generations that came after could not do the same, no matter how much bootstrap pulling they did. Vance's story would likely have played out somewhat differently if he had been born 10 years later. The author is on the way to some good answers but he is not there, I hope he keeps thinking about these issues.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Bostonseanachie
JD Vance grew up as a hillbilly (his own term) with a spiritual home in a Kentucky holler and an actual home (actually, multiple homes due to a peripatetic drug-abusing serially marrying mother) in southwestern Ohio. From these humble origins, he went on to the Marine Corps, a successful
Show More
undergraduate career, a JD from Yale Law School, and a job at a big law firm. He attributes his success neither to government programs or policy (indeed, he indicts the same on many occasions) nor (thankfully) to his own pluck, brains and pioneering American spirit. Instead, in a nutshell, he posits (to borrow a phrase) that it “takes a village” to raise a child to break the cycle of rustbelt and Appalachian poverty--in his case, he evokes a hillbilly community like his consisting of a pair of fearless engaged grandparents, a heroic sister, and excellent mentors.

For Vance, the key is that hillbillies (and the poor blacks to whom he frequently compares them) have surrendered a sense of agency -- that anything they may do matters or is effective or is consequential. And this is key: Vance sees them as agents who have surrendered agency, not people from whom agency has been taken by (name your villain) oppression, racism, lack of opportunity, or government programs creating a cycle of laziness.

This is a hard book to like. Putting aside the inevitably smarminess of a 31-year-old writing a memoir and purporting to have answers for the dark, complicated and even byzantine personalities among whom he grew up, and the very selective recourse to certain types of supporting scholarship and research, Vance unearths but does not quite address one theme that seems to animate both him in his success as well as those he left behind: rage. Blinding, inexplicable rage.

His own rage he attributes to a hillbilly ethos and machismo as well as to ACEs (adverse childhood experiences). But rage seems to permeate every character he evokes. That rage may be effective in achieving its short term goals (often pride-based), but often Vance depicts an impotent rage that expresses itself in self-destructive choices; suspicion of media, churches, and other institutions; and hair-trigger violence. Vance continues to experience it even after he has achieved the American dream. It is pervasive and Vance does not really investigate its importance to the hillbilly predicament. How much of this rage is the cause of economic distress (and economic inequality made painfully visible and immediate by television and the media) or its result is not made clear by Hillbilly Elegy.

Vance is clearly smart, clearly driven, and clearly the beneficiary of some lucky breaks and good mentors. He wants to restore agency to hillbilly people -- not entirely blaming them from bad choices but also not relieving them from responsibility. What the book lacks (and perhaps this is too much to ask of a memoir) is a prescription for tempering the rage and fostering the sort of hillbilly community Vance thinks is essential.
Show Less
LibraryThing member PeggyDean
Vance presents a fascinating look into the culture that persists even today in the rural areas of Appalachia. Poverty, distrust of outsiders, domestic violence and drug addictions all create stumbling blocks to success. These social issues have been carried with families who have moved out of the
Show More
traditional geographic borders of Appalachia as these families migrated in search of better jobs. This should be required reading for educators and anyone who provides services to this population. Vance presents heart-breaking family stories, but he also writes powerfully about the difference that personal intervention can make in the life of a child.
Show Less

Awards

Kirkus Prize (Finalist — Nonfiction — 2016)
Audie Award (Finalist — Non-Fiction — 2017)
Ohioana Book Award (Winner — 2017)
Dayton Literary Peace Prize (Shortlist — Nonfiction — 2017)
Southern Book Prize (Winner — Creative Nonfiction — 2017)
Page: 4.6344 seconds