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Hillbilly elegy : a memoir of a family and culture in crisis

Author

Vance, J. D., author.

Title

Hillbilly elegy : a memoir of a family and culture in crisis / J.D. Vance.

Format

Book

Edition

First edition.

Published

New York, NY : Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, [2016] ©2016

Description

264 pages ; 24 cm

URL

<View cover image provided by Mackin> http://www.mackin.com/BookPics/Book.aspx?isbn=9780062300546 http://www.jdvance.com/ http://books.google.com/books?isbn=9780062300546 - (Additional information at Google Books)

Portion of title

Memoir of a family and culture in crisis

Notes

Includes bibliographical references (pages 263-264).

Summary

Shares the story of the author's family and upbringing, describing how they moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan that included the author, a Yale Law School graduate, while navigating the demands of middle class life and the collective demons of the past. Vance, a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, provides an account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm. 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 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--Publisher's website.

Awards

#1 New York Times Bestseller

Subject headings

Vance, J. D Vance, J. D.--Family Working class white people--United States--Biography. Working class white people--United States--Social conditions. Mountain people--Kentucky--Social conditions. Social mobility--United States--Case studies. nf0916. Biografieën. Sociale mobiliteit. Armoede. Appalachian Region--Economic conditions. Appalachian Region Economic conditions.

Genre heading

Staff pick. Autobiographies. Biography. Case studies. Autobiographies.

ISBN

9780062300546 (hardback) 0062300547 (hardback) 9780008220556 (paperback) 0008220557 (paperback) 9781410496669 (large print) 141049666X (large print) 9780062300553 0062300555

Standard Identifier

9780062300546 52799