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A review by headingnorth
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance
4.0
This is currently the most-requested book in my library system with over 1000 holds right now. It's been fairly popular since it came out in June, but interest has really spiked since the election. I've heard it recommended to help people try and understand the election, but that's very simplistic thinking. This doesn't begin to explain the clusterfuck of the 2016 US Presidential election and all the factors that affected the outcome. What it does is offer some insight into the lives of rural, working-class white people, which for me is value enough.
Although I live in eastern Massachusetts and have a career and am fairly worldly at this point in my life, I was born in a rural area full of working-class white people, not terribly different from what Vance describes. So I forget that this culture is pretty alien to a lot of people, and the popularity of this book as a learning tool has therefore surprised me. I'm very glad it's so popular though, because I think that poor, rural, white people are very much overlooked in our culture. That's why I was so interested to read this book when I first learned about it earlier this year. It's one of several books related to this topic that have been published recently, a trend that I hope continues.
My full post is here.
Although I live in eastern Massachusetts and have a career and am fairly worldly at this point in my life, I was born in a rural area full of working-class white people, not terribly different from what Vance describes. So I forget that this culture is pretty alien to a lot of people, and the popularity of this book as a learning tool has therefore surprised me. I'm very glad it's so popular though, because I think that poor, rural, white people are very much overlooked in our culture. That's why I was so interested to read this book when I first learned about it earlier this year. It's one of several books related to this topic that have been published recently, a trend that I hope continues.
My full post is here.