Summary of Hillbilly Elegy : a Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance

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BookNation: Summary of Hillbilly Elegy : a Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance (2021, Independently Published)

English language

Published June 27, 2021 by Independently Published.

ISBN:
979-8-5962-9397-5
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3 stars (34 reviews)

1 edition

Review of 'Summary of Hillbilly Elegy : a Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

A book slightly outside of my own experiences, so at times the American angles didn't work for me, but on another level the critical analysis from an insider of what the problems are for a group in our society chimed with me. Interesting and manages to interweave personal understanding with critical awareness.

Review of 'Summary of Hillbilly Elegy : a Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

This book disappointed me. I was initially compelled, hopeful, but the insight was very short of paradigm shifting and the memoir section was almost tedious. My parents were from Preble county Ohio, (a county he mentions), and my own background is similar. So I was open to this book, and many of his anecdotes and expressions are familiar to me.
While advertised as some kind of manifesto for the rust belt, it is more of a memoir and less of a discerning social critique. To extrapolate a culture from a single representative of one family is arrogant and short sighed. Such a thing can only be done in a perceptive work of fiction. He tries though, because he made it big time. Guess where? Yale. He will tell you that 1000 times.
Yet I also found it hard to care about another white male's journey to the upper echelons. And …

Review of 'Summary of Hillbilly Elegy : a Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

I listened to this on audiobook. It was the common read book for the college where I work. Very,very interesting. I live in Ohio so I can relate to a lot of the mindset that J.D. speaks of. Not the hillbilly side but the blue collar side of blame and woe about lost jobs.

Review of 'Summary of Hillbilly Elegy : a Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

I think I wish Vance had set out to write a true memoir. Hillbilly Elegy is at its best in those autobiographical moments -- you really feel for teenage Vance, his poor sister/surrogate-mother and his matriarch figure of a grandmother. Many memoirs increase their narrative power by adding analysis, but in Vance's case, I think the result is less than the sum of its parts. When he switches to political or socioeconomic commentary he takes an extremely preachy tone, which I think is not necessarily warranted by the narrative.

Although I would consider this book a four-star work (all for the memoir portions), three sentences really detracted for me. It's highly unusual for me to have such a visceral reaction to a single sentence, much less more than once in a book, but here we are:

1. In the very beginning (and then repeatedly throughout), Vance talks about how "Hillbillies" …

Review of 'Summary of Hillbilly Elegy : a Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

A compassionate, modern update to the hillbilly stereotype. This is a useful book, not because it slices apart race from economics and culture, and not because it's a well-written lyric masterpiece (which it does and it is not), but because it yields a new way of thinking about problems in our education and economic systems, and because it helped me find a pattern in some of the stories shaken from my own family tree.

Hillbilly culture is an honor culture, and defending the family honor goes with hiding the family's problems. The ineffectual treatment of those problems by well-meaning family members helps create a cycle of failure, dependency, and despair. It's this despair of learned helplessness, where someone believes no matter what he does, his fate is sealed and no decision or action can effect improvement in his life, that Vance attributes to the dysfunction and resentment building in his …

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