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Loading... Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (edition 2016)by J. D. Vance (Author)
Work InformationHillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. LT Title of Book, Author, Publisher, year of publication, dates I read/studied book Recommended by [if anybody], Where is hard copy? Theme: Type: Value: Age: Interest: Objectionable: Synopsis/Noteworthy: 3 embrace of cultural tradition 193-4 trusting institutions 220 social capital chap 13 22-2 mannersw 237 Christianity 243 courts 261 249 pajamas 256 what can we do? A more conservative view than Sarah Smarsh's on the inequalities that keep the white working class from participating to the American Dream, but a moving, heartfelt and enlightening one nonetheless. At least, the author acknowledges that European Countries with a strong socialdemocratic take on social welfare do the American Dream better than America. It's very instructive to hear, for once, the voice of hillbillies or any other neglected groups speaking for themselves, as subject of action rather than object of policy. Or worse, horror movie pitchfork crowds with fiddles...
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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. No library descriptions found. |
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I've been waiting to read this of-the-moment book, and grabbed it when I saw it on my library's Speed Read shelf. As I started reading it, I realized it wasn't exactly what I was expecting. I was expecting something that was part memoir, part social history, but this book is almost entirely memoir.
I read this book specifically looking for insight into the lives angry, white, working-class population that comprises Donald Trump's base. On that measure, I can't say that I come away from the book with any better understanding than I had at the beginning. No aha! moments aside from own hypotheses going into the book. Perhaps something more academic like [b:White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America|27209433|White Trash The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America|Nancy Isenberg|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1453059367s/27209433.jpg|47250924] would provide more answers. ( )