380 pages
English language
Published Jan. 2, 2018 by Thorndike Press.
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.
This book was a great explanatory read describing why people change how they think. It was a little too much on the "feel sorry for these people, which makes it OK for them to look at their world as a zero-sum game" for my tastes.
On one level I really enjoyed this book. It's really honest about a family that's often made up of people with good hearts doing horrible things. It's a sympathetic, and unshakeably real portrayal of a life.
But, it's interspersed with some truly worrying social commentary. Vance (who works for the cartoonishly evil tech giant Peter Thiel, by the way) genuinely believes that the white working class did this to themselves, and he genuinely believes that if you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, join the military, and then make it to Yale law school, you too can do better. The personal stuff in this story is really sympathetic and interesting and cool, but the political commentary in it is truly insidious. He makes arguments that the poor don't deserve welfare because they misuse it, while failing to address the real reasons that so many working class jobs have evaporated in …
On one level I really enjoyed this book. It's really honest about a family that's often made up of people with good hearts doing horrible things. It's a sympathetic, and unshakeably real portrayal of a life.
But, it's interspersed with some truly worrying social commentary. Vance (who works for the cartoonishly evil tech giant Peter Thiel, by the way) genuinely believes that the white working class did this to themselves, and he genuinely believes that if you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, join the military, and then make it to Yale law school, you too can do better. The personal stuff in this story is really sympathetic and interesting and cool, but the political commentary in it is truly insidious. He makes arguments that the poor don't deserve welfare because they misuse it, while failing to address the real reasons that so many working class jobs have evaporated in the last couple of decades.
This book has become a touchstone for the liberal person trying to understand where the Trump campaign came from, and I confess that's partially why I picked it up. And to me it seems to give all the wrong answers. It's not that the author avoids the question, but rather than honestly addressing the ways in which the white working class lashes out against immigrants and racialized people in an effort to gain the "psychic wage of whiteness," Vance chooses instead to frame the white working class--and poor people in general, as lazy and somehow deserving of their fate. Rather than coming to a productive place of understanding, you leave the book with the distaste for poor people it seems that the author has, even though he once was one.
