Hillbilly Elegy

A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

De: J. D. Vance

Narrado por: J. D. Vance

Hillbilly Elegy recounts J.D. Vance's powerful origin story...

From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate now serving as a U.S. Senator from Ohio and the Republican Vice Presidential candidate for the 2024 election, an incisive 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 #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

""You will not read a more important book about America this year.""—The Economist

""A riveting book.""—The Wall Street Journal

""Essential reading.""—David Brooks, New York Times

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported 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 one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his 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.

Making Sense

In a recent NY Times column, conservative intellectual David Brooks recommended this book as offering insight into a mystery of recent political trends in the United States (and, to an extent, in other parts of the Western world). Why do so many angry, disaffected, lower-to-middle class white people vote in a seemingly irrational manner that often appears even to be against their own self-interest?

J.D. Vance is an ivy league-educated young lawyer with a particularly good background for exploring the anger and rage that has led to such upheaval in recent elections. He was born in Eastern Kentucky's hill country and then moved with his family to the industrial rust belt of the midwest.

In claiming this "hillbilly" background, Vance attempts to make sense of (if not excuses for) a culture that has lost its way and is feeling left out of what used to be seen as the American birthright of optimism and high expectations for the future.

Vance's family story is at times hilarious, often appalling, and ultimately heartbreaking. His affection for his fiercely loyal but very flawed mother, grandparents (you will never forget "Mamaw" and "Papaw"!) and extended family is obvious and to be commended. Yet his personal success and years away from that culture give him a clear view of the toll that geographic displacement, economic failure, lack of education, and drugs have taken on an increasingly helpless and hopeless portion of the population.

As a technologically advanced nation, we have to find a way to reach out to and bring along those who are feeling disaffected. Everyone agrees on that. "Hillbilly Elegy" doesn't tell us how to accomplish this task, but it gives us a much-needed glimpse inside the problem.

These are real people with a rich history in this country - people of value and sensibility - and they need help. Trying to understand them is the very least we can do, and J.D. Vance helps us get there.

Good story, questionable politics

It gets weird when Vance blames small town working poor for their own problems. I too come from a town with very little opportunity for upward mobility. I'm from Kansas, but identify with a lot of this story. Later in the book I start to cringe as Vance falls into the same old tired bootstrap criticisms that do little but perpetuate poor people stereotypes. Those stereotypes allow people to look at the poor, shake their heads and say, "look what they've done to themselves" while people who "got out" write memoirs about beating the odds.

Relevant

Not having Appalachian heritage but growing up in Appalachian Ohio this book articulated so many patterns I've seen in my own communities. While the book does not offer solutions for the problems that face these communities, it names them and that is an important first step for progress. The book also gives a face to the working class and humanizes folks who have been "othered" for far too long.

I was prepared to hate this book...

After reading the sanctimonious "Republican Like Me," I expected this book to be another thinly veiled swipe at the ignorance of the classless middle class. I could not have been more mistaken. With some differences, this book could be the story of my life. The story of how my mother's life choices impacted her children. How the stabilizing presence of my Grannie, who never cursed and read the bible to her grandchildren every night, gave me enough support to make a different life for my self. Some of us overcome, some do not. The journey takes hard work and good role models. I am lucky.

Uplifting, Informative, and Astute.

I loved Hillbilly Elegy. The genius of this book was the author’s ability to blend his very personal story with a sociological and psychological look at this hillbilly part of the American culture and how it has developed. So while the book is academic in its analysis, it is also personal and really interesting as J.D. Vance describes his life and how and, most importantly, WHY he was able to rise above it.

I had the same feelings I had in Sonia Sotomayor’s autobiography because both of these people were able to beat the odds and rise above the poverty and chaos into which they were born. It is so gratifying and heartwarming to read stories like that. Sonia Sotomayor was mentioned in the book because she spoke at J.D. Vance’s graduation from Yale law school.

At the end of the book J.D. Vance gives his ideas for how our society can better deal with the problems of poverty and cultural detachment from which this area of the country is suffering. His ideas are not easy fixes and may never happen, but they are really thought provoking and come from a deep inner knowledge of the world about which he writes.