The National Review, which employed Vance as an occasional contributor, was positively gleeful about the book’s release. Their review, one of the first, all but explicitly congratulated the author for at long last proving that white Appalachians have “followed the black underclass and Native Americans not just into family disintegration, addiction, and other pathologies, but also perhaps into the most important self-sabotage of all, the crippling delusion that they cannot improve their lot by their own effort.”
