Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir

Here we find women and men who dearly love their country, yet who feel powerless as their way of life is devastated. Vance writes powerfully about the real people who are kept out of sight by academic abstractions.” (Peter Thiel, entrepreneur, investor, and author of Zero to One) . Never before have I read a memoir so powerful, and so necessary. You cannot understand what’s happening now without first reading J.D. It’s also a profoundly important book, one that opens a window on a part of America usually hidden from view and offers genuine hope in the form of hard-hitting honesty. Hillbilly Elegy announces the arrival of a gifted and utterly original new writer and should be required reading for everyone who cares about what’s really happening in America.” (Amy Chua, New York Times bestselling author of The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother)“Elites tend to see our social crisis in terms of ‘

A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and 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.. J. Vance's grandparents moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. D. However, Vance's family struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of poverty. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility

Vance is a former Marine and a graduate of Yale Law School. He is a regular contributor to the National Review. D. . He lives in Washington, DC. J

PNRLM said An edifying and inspiring, if also troubling at times, read.. There is a lot to take in here, even for someone that's seen this life up close in many of its many guises.While ostensibly about the particular culture of the West Virginia Scots-Irish underclass, anyone that has seen white poverty in America's flyover states will recognize much of what is written about here. It is a life on the very edge of plausibility, without the sense of extra-family community that serves as a stabilizing agent in many first-generation immigrant communities or . "An inside look at a world many of us know all too well." according to Kathleen Valentine. I spent most of the last 2 days reading this book and I can't stop thinking about it. I never heard of the author until I saw him on Morning Joe a few days ago but I looked him up and read several articles he wrote for various publications so I bought his book. He grew up in a family of what he describes as "hillbillies" from Kentucky but spent most of his life in Ohio. His family identified as being strongly Christian even though their behavior was frequently not particularly Christ. "This Harvard Law grad finally has a Yale man he can respect" according to Amazon Customer. I grew up without running water in Boone County, WV, and wound up with a degree from Harvard Law School. JD Vance's story brought me to tears and cheers, for he has told the story of my people.