BOOK REPORT......

Hillbilly Elegy - J. D. Vance

Product Description(Amazon)

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported 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 postwar 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 one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history.
A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country. 
Paperback: 288 pages 
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks; Reprint edition (May 1, 2018) 
Language: English 
ISBN-10: 0062300555 
ISBN-13: 978-0062300553

This is my book club book for August.  Do you believe Hillbilly's is a cultural thing?  Well, I was married to a hillbilly for 48 years.  My hubby was a Kentuckian.  He moved to Indiana, got a job, and had friends.  According to this book.  The working class of America is in crisis.  My husband were among that class of people.  And believe me, it is a fact that the middle class families have a hard time making a living.....not because they don't work, it's because the money they make is so low you live from pay check to pay check.  You can't get ahead of the game.  This author takes you into the middle of this crisis.  Really awesome book. 

5*****