From the Bookshelf of Around The World…

[close] Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance
Non-fiction

From The Book:
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.

My Thoughts:
"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."

While the book and the author focus on his own background...a dirt poor...Scot-Irish... section of coal country in Kentucky..anyone at all that is familiar with poverty in America will recognize... and to some extent sympathize... with J.D. Vance's attempt to tell his family's story.

It's so easy to lump classes of people together and tag them with the same stamp...but if there has been any attempt to get to know them as individuals we would soon see that while they share some common denominators...they are each different in their own ways. I know this was the authors attempt when he started the story but somewhere along the way he seemed to threw the family that he obviously loved with all their many faults...into the same giant melting pot. I do have to give the author credit that at the end of his story he expressed his growing realization, that while individuals do not have total control over the shapes of their lives, their choices do in fact matter...that one does always have input into the life that comes from being free to make choices... every day... and in every situation.