Hillbilly Elegy

AUTHOR: J.D. Vance PUBLISHER: HarperCollins RRP: $24.99 REVIEWER: Mary Ann Elliott

A VERY timely book on what is happening in America, and why, makes essential reading for anyone interested in this moment in history.

It’s a slice of America that doesn’t make the headlines; J.D. Vance offers a compelling look at his family who came from the wrong side of the tracks; the hillbillies of Kentucky’s Appalachian mountain region, many of who moved to towns in a desperate search for work.

Thirty-one-year-old author J.D. Vance grew up poor, in the Rust Belt in an Ohio steel town, that held out little prospect for advancement, let alone jobs. The kid with a grim future nevertheless joined the Marine Corps, graduated from Yale Law School and today has a nice job, family and comfortable home.

In spite of his achievements, Vance says “upward mobility is never clean-cut” and the world he left behind finds a way of reeling him back. He is still a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart and identifies with the millions of white working-class who have no college degree and for whom poverty is the family tradition.

Vance traces the effect ethnicity and geography has had on the current political climate and tells his story at grass-roots level. He charts his childhood, growing up with a loving but drug addicted, debt-ridden and five times married mother. Against all the odds, he has crested the waves from Middletown kid to Yale Law graduate.

In the wake of Trump’s election, Vance has written an article for the New York Times; Life Outside the Liberal Bubble. Will Trump’s slogan, “Make America great again”, ring true for the majority?