From crime thrillers to business profiles, these are the most frequently recommended books from

Whatever word hillbillies use for the mores of a moment, you can bet it isn’t “zeitgeist”. Yet that is exactly what this book — a memoir written by a relatively ordinary American man of 32 — has

Looking for a captivating read with vivid characters and rich stories? Check Out Hillbilly Elegy! I could not put it down.

Description About the Book Shares the story of the author's family and upbringing, describing how they moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan that included the author--a Yale Law School graduate--while navigating the demands of middle class life and the collective demons of the past. Book Synopsis #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, NAMED BY THE TIMES AS ONE OF 6 BOOKS TO HELP UNDERSTAND TRUMP'S WIN AND SOON TO BE A MAJOR-MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY RON HOWARD You will not read a more important book about America this year.--The Economist A riveting book.--The Wall Street Journal Essential reading.--David Brooks, New York Times 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. 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. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance's grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country. From the Back Cover From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a probing look at the struggles of America's white working class through the author's own story of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis--that of poor, white Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for over forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. In Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hanging around your neck. The Vance family story began with hope 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 one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country. Review Quotes [A]n American classic, an extraordinary testimony to the brokenness of the white working class, but also its strengths. It's one of the best books I've ever read... [T]he most important book of 2016. You cannot understand what's happening now without first reading J.D. Vance.--Rod Dreher, The American Conservative "[An] understated, engaging debut...An unusually timely and deeply affecting view of a social class whose health and economic problems are making headlines in this election year."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "J.D. Vance's memoir, "Hillbilly Elegy", offers a starkly honest look at what that shattering of faith feels like for a family who lived through it. You will not read a more important book about America this year."--The Economist "[Hillbilly Elegy] couldn't have been better timed...a harrowing portrait of much that has gone wrong in America over the past two generations...an honest look at the dysfunction that afflicts too many working-class Americans."--National Review "[Hillbilly Elegy] is a beautiful memoir but it is equally a work of cultural criticism about white working-class America....[Vance] offers a compelling explanation for why it's so hard for someone who grew up the way he did to make it...a riveting book."--Wall Street Journal "The troubles of the working poor are well known to policymakers, but Vance offers an insider's view of the problem."--Christianity Today "[A] compassionate, discerning sociological analysis...Combining thoughtful inquiry with firsthand experience, Mr. Vance has inadvertently provided a civilized reference guide for an uncivilized election, and he's done so in a vocabulary intelligible to both Democrats and Republicans. Imagine that."--Jennifer Senior, New York Times "[A] frank, unsentimental, harrowing memoir...a superb book..."--New York Post "[A] new memoir that should be read far and wide."--Institute of Family Studies "[Vance's] description of the culture he grew up in is essential reading for this moment in history."--David Brooks, New York Times "A beautifully and powerfully written memoir about the author's journey from a troubled, addiction-torn Appalachian family to Yale Law School, Hillbilly Elegy is shocking, heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, and hysterically funny. It's also a profoundly important book, one that opens a window on a part of America usually hidden from view and offers genuine hope in the form of hard-hitting honesty. Hillbilly Elegy announces the arrival of a gifted and utterly original new writer and should be required reading for everyone who cares about what's really happening in America."--Amy Chua, New York Times bestselling author of The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother "Both heartbreaking and heartwarming, this memoir is akin to investigative journalism. ... A quick and engaging read, this book is well suited to anyone interested in a study of modern America, as Vance's assertions about Appalachia are far more reaching."--Library Journal "Elites tend to see our social crisis in terms of 'stagnation' or 'inequality.' J. D. Vance writes powerfully about the real people who are kept out of sight by academic abstractions."--Peter Thiel, entrepreneur, investor, and author of Zero to One "Vance compellingly describes the terrible toll that alcoholism, drug abuse, and an unrelenting code of honor took on his family, neither excusing the behavior nor condemning it...The portrait that emerges is a complex one...Unerringly forthright, remarkably insightful, and refreshingly focused, Hillbilly Elegy is the cry of a community in crisis."--Booklist "Vance movingly recounts the travails of his family."--Washington Post "What explains the appeal of Donald Trump? Many pundits have tried to answer this question and fallen short. But J.D. Vance nails it...stunning...intimate..."--Globe and Mail (Toronto) To understand the rage and disaffection of America's working-class whites, look to Greater Appalachia. In HILLBILLY ELEGY, J.D. Vance confronts us with the economic and spiritual travails of this forgotten corner of our country. Here we find women and men who dearly love their country, yet who feel powerless as their way of life is devastated. Never before have I read a memoir so powerful, and so necessary.--Reihan Salam, executive editor, National Review

2020 American Book Award winner, Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award Weatherford Award winner, nonfiction With hundreds of thousands of copies sold, a Ron Howard movie in the works, and the rise of its author as a media personality, J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis has defined Appalachia for much of the nation. What about Hillbilly Elegy accounts for this explosion of interest during this period of political turmoil? Why have its ideas raised so much controversy? And how can debates about the book catalyze new, more inclusive political agendas for the region’s future? Appalachian Reckoning is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow Hillbilly Elegy has cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond Hillbilly Elegy to allow Appalachians from varied backgrounds to tell their own diverse and complex stories through an imaginative blend of scholarship, prose, poetry, and photography. The essays and creative work collected in Appalachian Reckoning provide a deeply personal portrait of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. Complicating simplistic visions that associate the region almost exclusively with death and decay, Appalachian Reckoning makes clear Appalachia’s intellectual vitality, spiritual richness, and progressive possibilities. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9781946684790 Media Type: Paperback(1st Edition) Publisher: West Virginia University Press Publication Date: 02-13-2019 Pages: 432 Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.10(d)About the Author Anthony Harkins is a professor of history at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he teaches courses in popular culture and twentieth-century United States history and American studies. He is the author of Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon.Meredith McCarroll is the director of writing and rhetoric at Bowdoin College, where she teaches courses in writing, American literature, and film. She is the author of Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film.Read an Excerpt Read an Excerpt CHAPTER 1 PART I Considering Hillbilly Elegy INTERROGATING HILLBILLY ELITISM T. R. C. HUTTON Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile The short and simple annals of the poor. The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Awaits alike th' inevitable hour: The paths of glory lead but to the grave. — Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" Ain't nothing scarier than poor white people. — Chris Rock IT IS A COMMON REFRAIN among Appalachia's writers and defenders that the region has rarely been allowed to speak for itself. Since the 1870s, the region has been incessantly "discovered" and then "rediscovered" by a long series of novelists, journalists, social scientists, satirists, and documentarians, most — if not all — inspired by the irony of Appalachian Otherness. How can a region defined by the Euro-American frontier myth be so different, so far behind, the perceived American mainstream? "'Inequality,'" liberal polemicist Thomas Frank wrote in 2016, "is a euphemism for the Appalachification of our world." Frank's intended analogy, and his invented noun-verb, would be meaningless without the prior work of William Wallace Harney, William Frost, John Fox Jr., Paul Webb, Horace Kephart, Harry Caudill, and many other writers who established the permanent American assumption of innate Appalachian depravity and poverty. The previous authors first established Appalachia not only as a region unlike the American mainstream, but also as a place with crippled access to the commonly assumed entitlements of Americanness. Now, Frank is suggesting that the country at large is learning to temper its expectations just like Appalachia has been doing since it was first "discovered." J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016) is the latest book-length attempt to explain Appalachia to the "outside world," and a special plea for why it needs explaining, given this new era of lowered expectations. Hillbilly Elegy is also the most recent book-length attempt to come highly recommended: National Review executive editor Reihan Salam, Silicon Valley scion Peter Thiel, and "tiger mother" Amy Chua all wrote glowing jacket blurbs. Positive reviews appeared across the conservative press, in Salam's National Review (where Vance regularly contributes), the American Conservative, and the Weekly Standard. Center-right columnist David Brooks hailed Hillbilly Elegy in a 2016 New York Times op-ed that called for a "better form of nationalism." "When I lived in Brussels," Brooks wrote, recalling his time in Belgium, "this sort of intense personal patriotism was simply not felt by the people who ran the EU, but it was felt by a lot of people in the member states. This honor code has been decimated lately. Conservatives argue that it has been decimated by cosmopolitan cultural elites who look down on rural rubes. There's some truth to this, as the reactions of smug elites to the Brexit vote demonstrate. But the honor code has also been decimated by the culture of the modern meritocracy, which awards status to the individual who works with his mind, and devalues the class of people who work with their hands." Throughout the summer of 2016, Brooks's praise was duly repeated among liberal commentators as well, especially those looking for a relatively simple explanation for the relative success of the Donald Trump presidential campaign. Around the time of Trump's election, Vance was roundly referred to as a "Trump whisperer." At the time of the book's greatest hype, Vance came across on the CNN screen as a sort of technocratic center-right figure not unlike Brooks or Thomas Friedman, the sort of briefcase Republican who in 2016 seemed like Kevin Bacon's character at the end of Animal House screaming to a panicked crowd to "remain calm, all is well!" despite the chaos and nonsense that pervaded the airwaves in light of the unprecedented presidential campaign. The outpouring of right-leaning support shouldn't be surprising, especially from Brooks, who has since spent many a column rending his proverbial garments over the changing face of American conservatism. But Vance's broader appeal is not limited to Brooks's technocratic vision of a trickle down world. It is far more general, and melds old political modes with newer ones. Vance, after all, is personally acquainted with most of them (Chua was his professor at Yale Law School), and Hillbilly Elegy staunchly defends the up-by-your-own-bootstraps fairy tale that capitalism has always used to win support from the underclasses. The white working class is a group Brooks can legitimately claim as conservative, even if his and Chua's brand of conservatism is not the same as what seems to make Trump appealing. But of course, the book is aimed not at that underclass (few books are), but rather at a middle- and upper-class readership more than happy to learn that white American poverty has nothing to do with them or with any structural problems in American economy and society and everything to do with poor white folks' inherent vices. On cable news channels like CNN, Vance comes across as a voice of moderation, and a scold to his fellow technocrats for misunderstanding the white middle class that produced him. At the same time, Vance's professional associations with openly antidemocratic conservatives like Charles Murray and Peter Thiel, as well as his later courtship with the Heritage Foundation, have also raised eyebrows. Even though Vance presented himself in 2016 as an anti-Trump Republican and a Silicon Valley centrist (for instance, he criticized Republican attacks on the Affordable Care Act for their lack of a viable alternative plan), his professional trajectory previous to the publishing of Elegy suggests a politics probably defined by Reagan era conservatism (in contrast to Trump era nationalism). At its heart, Hillbilly Elegy might be seen simply as an antistatist screed about the failures of the Great Society. But a close reading suggests there is far more than that behind his story, particularly a forced obfuscation of class and region summarized by the word "hillbilly." In describing his meteoric rise from poverty, Vance paints a picture of generations-old depravity in his ancestral home in Kentucky, and his childhood home in Ohio. The poor are, as the English told themselves in Dickens's day, poor because of who they are, not because of their circumstances. Although Vance is more subtle than a Herbert Spencer or a William Graham Sumner, that is the chief takeaway from this book. Vance spells out his thesis in the introduction: conditions beyond their control brought economic hard times to white Americans in a particular part of America, but their preexistent "hillbilly culture" dictates that they react to "bad circumstances in the worst way possible" (7). It is a point he makes over and over again, using his parents, grandparents, and any number of kin and acquaintances as examples. Many of the stories are sad, while many others reflect the "old Southwest" humor tradition that dates back at least as far as Samuel Clemens's (later known as Mark Twain) "The Dandy Frightening the Squatter" (1852). Vance deems himself a bit of a dandy, but from a family of squatters, and he finds them both hilarious and pathetic; even his relatively heroic portrayal of his grandmother has embellishments reminiscent of Al Capp's Mammy Yokum. And when he wrote this book, he knew a significant segment of the middle-brow reading public would agree or, at least, respond positively. As far as media portrayals of Appalachia and the working class go, Hillbilly Elegy is nothing new under the sun. But its first-person narration by a regi

At Yale Law, the white working-class author wanted to fit in. But he didn’t know how to use a butter knife or what sparkling water was.

'THE POLITICAL BOOK OF THE YEAR' Sunday Times 'You will not read a more important book about America this year' Economist 'The best book about the alienation within America' Evening Standard 'The memoir gripping America...Vividly articulates the despair and disillusionment of blue-collar America' Sunday Times '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. The Vance family story begins hopefully in post-war America. J. D.'s grandparents were "dirt po. Mehr anzeigen

Jeff Robinson reviews J. D. Vance's 'Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and a Culture in Crisis' (HarperCollins, 2016).

\"The CNN analyst and youngest state representative in South Carolina's history illuminates the lives of America's forgotten rural, Black working-class men and women\"--\nNew York Times BestsellerWhat J. D. Vance did for Appalachia with Hillbilly Elegy, CNN analyst and one of the youngest state representatives in South Carolina history Bakari Sellers does for the rural South, in this important book that illuminates the lives of America's forgotten black working-class men and women. Part memoir, part historical and cultural analysis, My Vanishing Country is an eye-opening journey through the South's past, present, and future.Anchored in in Bakari Seller's hometown of Denmark, South Carolina, Country illuminates the pride and pain that continues to fertilize the soil of one of the poorest states in the nation. He traces his father's rise to become, friend of Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King, a civil rights hero, and member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), to explore the plight of the South's dwindling rural, black working class--many of whom can trace their ancestry back for seven generations.In his poetic personal history, we are awakened to the crisis affecting the other \"Forgotten Men & Women,\" who the media seldom acknowledges. For Sellers, these are his family members, neighbors, and friends. He humanizes the struggles that shape their lives: to gain access to healthcare as rural hospitals disappear; to make ends meet as the factories they have relied on shut down and move overseas; to hold on to precious traditions as their towns erode; to forge a path forward without succumbing to despair. My Vanishing Country is also a love letter to fatherhood--to Sellers' father, his lodestar, whose life lessons have shaped him, and to his newborn twins, who he hopes will embrace the Sellers family name and honor its legacy.

Columnist Victor Dwyer recommends a Canadian counterpart to JD Vance's memoir Hillbilly Elegy.

No screens, no screeds, no screaming. Ahhhh.

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