Hillbilly Elegy

Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance

In this mostly memoir, Vance tries to shed some light on the plight of working class white Americans in the

midwest, the segment of the population that were largely responsible for propelling Donald Trump to the White House. He uses his own story, which was filled with family dysfunction, as a way to explore why this group of people has floundered economically in the post-industrial economy. His conclusions seem to suggest that it is the culture of the area itself that is largely to blame. He points to a discrepancy between people's expectations for life and their behavior that many inhabitants cannot see. When a co-worker at a warehouse Vance was working at to make money for law school was fired for chronic tardiness and hour-long bathroom breaks, he complains that the supervisor merely had it out for him from the beginning. But while Vance does seem to offer many causes of this demographic's state of affairs, he posits very few solutions. Vance is a good story teller, and he certainly has a personal story worth telling, and I appreciated the way he zoomed in and out from his own life to the life of his larger community. He deftly wove these two stories together.