Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

by J.D. Vance

Book Overview

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, NAMED BY THE TIMES AS ONE OF "6 BOOKS TO HELP UNDERSTAND TRUMP'S WIN" AND SOON TO BE A MAJOR-MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY RON HOWARD "You will not read a more important book about America this year."-- The Economist "A riveting book."-- The Wall Street Journal "Essential reading."--David Brooks, New York Times From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0062300547
• ISBN13: 9780062300546
• Release Date: June 2016
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.03 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

You live what you learn until you learn differently

I thank J. D. Vance for sharing his life story with us all. This book brought tears and happiness to me in reading. I LOVED the ending but won’t spill that with you. Hillbilly Eulogy was a great read!

Resilience

I could not put this book down! What struck me the most is the resilient determination of a young hillbilly boy who was born into a life surrounded by poverty yet managed to live through the toughest of circumstances. We are all born into and among different types of environments. This young boy along with his family from the Appalachian mountains, an area that is unusual in it's own right, a place where most children who have lived their entire lives there, having never left their impoverished lifestyle while continually being looked upon by city folks as being unrefined. This is a story of love of family, their strengths and their weaknesses, yet they are forever bound through the unity of family, with the use of tuff love, all that is required for their success through all obstacles. Its story contains the harshness of behavior and its consequences, yet it also holds some level of humor leaving no doubt that the love of family is most important and the willingness to change ones circumstances by beating all odds in order to rise and live a successful life is possible!

A Book Everyone Should Read

At first, I thought it was another sad book about the underserved people in areas of the south and I didn't care to read more of that. But instead, it is a wonderful book about the writer striving and overcoming his growing up years in Eastern Kentucky and, while keeping his good and not so good memories of family and the poverty of his surroundings, overcome all to join the Marine Corps, then using that training and discipline to go on to become an Ivy League lawyer. Instead of running away from his past to become an Eastern elite, he chose to take another path and use his considerable talents to contribute in other ways. Having lived a somewhat similar early life in small town middle Illinois, I related strongly to this story. It is moving and one of the best books I have read in a long time. I hope this is not the author's one and only book.