Select language, opens an overlay

Comment

Hillbilly Elegy

a Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
Dec 29, 2017mjohnson313 rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
For all of the buzz, I'm not really sure what epiphanies J.D. Vance's lackluster prose are supposed to elicit. His conclusions are fairly rudimentary: broken families lead to youth without support systems lead to bad decisions or coping behaviors that maintain the cycle of poverty. Nothing ground breaking here. The primary tool is a first-person account of life inside the cycle, with anecdotal evidence providing a clear demonstration of the adverse effects of a childhood without stability. Of course, many of those stories (even the ones that in theory demonstrate the author's "damage" or "challenges") somehow reinforce the success of the hero—whether triumphing as a hillbilly or in his escape from the hillbilly community. It's fine, but not the tour de force of insightful retrospective I was expecting.