Hillbilly Elegy

Author: J. D. Vance

J.D. Vance could not have picked a better time to write his novel. He opens with the statement which I paraphrase as “So much of America’s white working class are hill people, and they are not doing well.” The numerous postmortems of the  2016 Presidential Elections has made this abundantly clear; so much so that many political pundits are eager to read “The Hillbilly Elegy” to see if it gives them some special insight that they can use in the next election. 

JD is prescient In saying that "Bad neighborhoods no longer plague only urban ghettos; the bad neighborhoods have spread to the suburbs". In today's Wall Street Journal I read that rural America is the new inner city. They profile Canton in rural Ohio that once had factories for train cabooses and axles for commercial trucks. Many of these have since closed down and opioid abuse is driving up crane in these neighborhoods. It looks very much like the Middletown that JD Vance describes in his book. 

The book is a personal story of J.D. Vance’s dysfunctional family that traces its roots back to the Appalachian region in Kentucky. You get a first hand account of how precarious their lives are and they are one step away from falling afoul of the law, or turning  homeless. As he points out several times, it’s a miracle that he got a college education and broke free from the shackles that hold back most of his fellow Appalachians.


I love this quote which I'm sure is taken from somewhere else "The road to hell, however, is paved with good intentions". This captures well the behavior of JDs extended family. There are many nuggets of information that caught me by surprise like the fact that "in the middle of the Bible belt, active church attendance is actually quite low."

Read this book to get a first-hand view of the Americans that swayed the 2016 Presidential Election.