Book Review- Hillbilly Elegy

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Just started Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance that was published in 2016 and is an autobiography about his childhood in Kentucky’s Appalachian region and later in the Rust Belt in Ohio.

Not a pretty story: drug and alcohol addiction, despair, poverty, dysfunctional behavior, but this author manages to attend OSU and Yale Law and become a successful investment banker. I’m only through the introduction but he has hinted that nobody and no govt intervention could have helped him make it. So what was it?

Interesting, no? I’m starting chapter one tonight and will post after every chapter. I’m intrigued by this story before I’ve even begun to read it.

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Published by liznaples57

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11 thoughts on “Book Review- Hillbilly Elegy”

  2. Can’t wait to start it. Hollywood is going ballistic about the movie (starring Glenn Close) so you know it must be deliciously politically incorrect. 🙂

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    1. The movie was panned because the book is associated with Trump’s victory. It’s this schizophrenic stuff: ALL white people in this country are wealthy and privileged, everybody KNOWS that. How dare Vance try to humanize, and empower, these poor, struggling, disadvantaged whites? OTOH oh wait, these are B. Hussein’s “bitter clingers” if they do exist, well, they deserve even worse than they’re getting!

      I’m glad you’re reading the book before seeing the movie. The book obviously is more nuanced. Can’t wait to hear your thoughts!

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  4. Liz and Mike, remember my post elsewhere about Austen’s “Emma” and the character’s remark about “the yeomanry”? It became very long and contentious with some Rats accusing ME of class snobbery, although my post had really been a paean to the people I grew up with and now live among again. Yes I’m from Appalachia too, despite what you may have heard about “The Poconos”.
    One of the things I appreciated about the Hillbilly Elegy movie was its scenery and settings. This is NOT Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” with its pictures of skeletal white sharecroppers standing in the doorways of dark wooden shacks. The homes shown , inside and out, are….bourgeois, they’re spacious and furnished and filled with memorabilia of family life—in spite of the fact that the lives of the residents are precarious, always on the precipice of being uprooted, shattered by penury, addiction, violence. And the actor who plays young JD should get an Oscar!

    [speaking of child actors, did anybody see “The Goldfinch”.? (You MUST READ Tartt’s book first , if you hope to make any sense of the movie!) I just mention it here because the child actors in that movie are superb; I’ve never seen anything like it, I thought of the Blackfriars troupe..READ THAT BOOK! then SEE THAT MOVIE!]

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