Hillbilly Elegy - A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ‘THE POLITICAL BOOK OF THE YEAR’ 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 the United States 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 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.

Product details

• Authors: J D Vance, J. D. Vance, J.D. Vance, Vance J. D.
• Publisher: William Collins
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 01.06.2017
• EAN: 9780008220563
• ISBN: 978-0-00-822056-3
• No. of pages: 264
• Dimensions: 128 mm x 196 mm x 19 mm
• Series: 172 POCHE; 172 POCHE
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies; Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Political science and political education; USA, Memoirs, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, Social Mobility, Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography, United States of America, USA, Social and cultural anthropology, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs