Vance, J.D. "Hillbilly Elegy"

Vance, J.D. "Hillbilly Elegy: a memoir of a family and culture in crisis" - 2016

This book was chosen as our latest book club book. After having read Arlie Russell Hochschild's "Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right", I thought, not another book that tries to explain Donald Trump. I doubt that any book can ever explain why he was elected because I believe there is no real reason for him.

However, I would not call this a book that explains why people vote for someone like that, it is a book that tries to explain how you can get out of a life that gives you no chances. Because the author was just someone like that, he had a mother who was addicted, who ran from one man to the next and would neglect her children. If things got too bad, the grandmother would step in as I am sure many grandmothers do.

Yes, J.D. Vance made me understand those people better. I don't know a community like that in Europe, where you more or less are doomed when you come from a certain area, where the school doesn't do much to help you get out of your situation. It was interesting to read and I think every politician should read this, should try to give these kids a better chance in life.

An interesting view about a society most people know nothing about. And that includes myself and the other members of my book club.

We discussed this in our international book club in June 2017.

From the back cover:

"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."