Hillbilly Elegy
Subtitle: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2017
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9780062300546
Copyright date: 2016
Description: 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.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : My name is J.D. Vance; title: Like most small children, I learned my home address; title: Hillbillies like to add their own twist to many words; title: Mamaw and Papaw had three kids; title: I was born in late summer 1984; title: I assume I'm not alone in having few memories from before I was six or seven; title: One of the questions I loathed, and that adults always asked, was whether I had any brothers or sisters; title: In the fall after I turned thirteen, Mom began dating Matt, a younger guy who worked as a firefighter; title: By the time I finished eighth grade, Mom had been sober for at least a year; title: Mamaw knew little of how this arrangement affected me; title: During my last year of high school, I tried out for the varsity golf team; title: I arrived for orientation at Ohio State in early September 2007; title: During my first round of law school applications, I didn't even apply to Yale, Harvard, or Stanford; title: As I began to think a bit more deeply about my own identity, I fell hard for a classmate of mine named Usha; title: As I started my second year of law school, I felt like I'd made it; title: What I remember most is the fucking spiders; title: Conclusion : Shortly before Christmas last year, I stood in the kids' section of a Washington, DC, Walmart