Hillbilly Elegy
Elegy --- (in modern literature) a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for
the dead. [Oxford online dictionary]
the dead. [Oxford online dictionary]
Some sites for reviews, questions, opinions .... etc. --------
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J. D. Vance has many attributes, including the one Napoleon most valued in his generals: luck. Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir of his poor, white Appalachian childhood and subsequent upward mobility through military service and Yale Law School, is a testament to Vance’s intelligence, honesty, and resilience. But he is also lucky in his timing, publishing his book at precisely the moment when we most need to deepen our understanding of America’s white poor.
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Required Reading for Education Reformers
The surprising best-seller "Hillbilly Elegy" has become something of a cause célèbre because it is said to explain the appeal of Donald Trump to the white underclass from which its author, J.D. Vance, emerged. Writing in The American Conservative, Rod Dreher aptly notes that the book "does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates's book did for poor black people: give them voice and presence in the public square."
The book should also be required reading among those of us in education and ed policy. It is a reminder of the roles that institutions play (and fail to play) in the lives of our young people, and that if a primary goal of education reform is to arrest generational poverty, that is not a race-based movement. Poverty is a "family tradition" among Vance's people, white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who were once "day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times."
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Big Read University of Wisconsin
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Questions for discussion; also interviews with author-- Resource guide
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Study guide
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David Brooks
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NPR interview
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… The thesis at the heart of “Hillbilly Elegy” is that anybody who isn’t able to escape the working class is essentially at fault. Sure, there’s a culture of fatalism and “learned helplessness,” but the onus falls on the individual…. This generalization is not the only problematic oversimplification in Vance’s book — he totally discounts the role racism played in the white working class’s opposition to President Obama and says, instead, it was because Obama dressed well, was a good father, and because Michelle Obama advocated eating healthy food — but it would be hard to understate what role Vance has played in reinvigorating the conservative bootstraps narrative for a new generation and, thus, emboldening Republican ideology.
To Vance’s credit, he has been critical of Donald Trump, calling the working class’s support of the billionaire a result of a “false sense of purpose,” but Vance’s portrait of poor Americans is alarmingly in lockstep with the philosophy of Republicans who are shamefully using Trump’s presidency to forward their own agenda of economic warfare. Certainly Jason Chaffetz’s comments are fueled by the same low opinion of the poor as Vance’s, as is Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s legislative agenda, which is focused on disabling the social safety net.
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… Leaving the undercurrent of self-loathing completely alone, Vance presents the spendthrift ways of the hillbilly, combined with violence and substance abuse, as the root problem to be solved. This is a very superficial analysis of what is an observable pattern of behavior in Appalachia, though there are many more stories of families who stretched what little money they had to send a child to college or provide for extended family members…..
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