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Hillbilly Elegy
A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
by J. D. Vance
- 23 Ratings
- 55 Want to read
- 2 Currently reading
- 31 Have read
Previews available in: English
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 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 forty 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.
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. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their 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.
Subjects
Mountain people, Family, Social mobility, Working class whites, Case studies, Economic conditions, Social conditions, Biography, Arbeitssoziologie, Sociology, Umschulungswerkstätten für Siedler und Auswanderer, Ausgrenzung, Sozialer Wandel, Rural, Armut, Poverty & Homelessness, Kleinstadt, Families, SOCIAL SCIENCE, Familiensoziologie, Economic history, Working class, ArbeiterklasseShowing one featured edition. View all 1 editions?
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Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
June 28, 2016, Harper
Hardcover
in English
0062300547 9780062300546
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Book Details
Published in
New York
Table of Contents
Introduction : My name is J.D. Vance | ||
Like most small children, I learned my home address | ||
Hillbillies like to add their own twist to many words | ||
Mamaw and Papaw had three kids | ||
I was born in late summer 1984 | ||
I assume I'm not alone in having few memories from before I was six or seven | ||
One of the questions I loathed, and that adults always asked, was whether I had any brothers or sisters | ||
In the fall after I turned thirteen, Mom began dating Matt, a younger guy who worked as a firefighter | ||
By the time I finished eighth grade, Mom had been sober for at least a year | ||
Mamaw knew little of how this arrangement affected me | ||
During my last year of high school, I tried out for the varsity golf team | ||
I arrived for orientation at Ohio State in early September 2007 | ||
During my first round of law school applications, I didn't even apply to Yale, Harvard, or Stanford | ||
As I began to think a bit more deeply about my own identity, I fell hard for a classmate of mine named Usha | ||
As I started my second year of law school, I felt like I'd made it | ||
What I remember most is the fucking spiders | ||
Conclusion : Shortly before Christmas last year, I stood in the kids' section of a Washington, DC, Walmart |
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Work Description
From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, this book is a probing look at the struggles of America's white working class through the author's own story of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town. Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis - that of poor, white Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for over forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside.
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- Created July 25, 2016
- 10 revisions
June 23, 2020 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
July 19, 2019 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
May 15, 2019 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
January 28, 2018 | Edited by CrisisMagazineReader | Edited without comment. |
July 25, 2016 | Created by Patrick Robbins | Added new book. |