BOOK REVIEW
HILLBILLY ELEGY: A MEMOIR OF A FAMILY AND CULTURE IN CRISIS
By J. D. Vance © 2016 Harper
Reviewed by
Elizabeth A. Amin, MD
J
. D. Vance graduated from Yale Law School with the class of 2013. It seems that no one was more surprised than he that a) he was accepted to Yale in 2010; b) that Yale’ s generous need-based scholarships made his time there a good business proposition and c) that by the time he graduated he had access to the networks( social capital) that former Presidents, Supreme Court Justices and Capitol legislators took for granted. It was at Yale that this self-described tall, white, straight guy, with roots in the hollers of Breathitt County, Kentucky, was thrust into a world in which he felt like“ an alien whose spaceship had crashed in Oz.”
This sense of alienation seems to have been the stimulus for his book. My impression is that he embarked on the memoir not with any desire for self-gratification or self-congratulation but to search for answers. The book is a sincere tribute to those family members, friends and mentors who helped him achieve his success. It is also an attempt to understand and explain the social, cultural, economic and educational factors that contribute to“ his people’ s failure to progress.” Both the book, published June 28, 2016 and J. D. himself, became reference points as pundits tried to explain the success of Donald Trump initially in the Republican primaries and subsequently in the general election. I was intrigued- reading about, listening to and watching the author. Reading the book was almost a secondary activity.
J. D. was born James Donald Bowman in the late summer of 1984, in Middletown Ohio, north along Route 23 from his ancestral home in Jackson, Kentucky. He was his mother’ s second child( with her second husband). His beloved sister Lindsay was five years older than he. She and their maternal grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw Vance, were the stabilizing influences in J. D.’ s early life. He recounts in some detail the history of his maternal great-grandparents, the Blantons, who with their extended families spent their lives almost entirely in Jackson. He ferrets out the probable reason why Mamaw( Bonnie Blanton) and Papaw( Jim Vance) headed north to Middletown as a young married couple. She was 13 and pregnant and he was only 16; both had to fake their ages on the baby’ s birth certificate. The baby died shortly after birth, but the young couple accepted their lot. Papaw went to work for Armco Steel. He made a good living. They moved up into the middle class in Middletown, and even though Mamaw kept and killed chickens in her back yard on a neat suburban street, eventually they made some friends in the neighborhood. Papaw taught himself to fix cars as a sideline. A son, Jimmy, was born in 1951. During the following decade Mamaw struggled through eight miscarriages but eventually they had two daughters, Bev,( J. D.' s mother) born in 1961, and Lori, born in 1963.
Uncle Jimmy Vance, to whom J. D. remains very close, furnished him with details of the family saga. By the time Jimmy was old
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