Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (MP3 CD)

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Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis By J. D. Vance (Read by) Cover Image

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (MP3 CD)

By J. D. Vance (Read by)

$39.99


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Staff Reviews


Audiobook review, listen for $0.99 from Libro.fm

An eye-opening account of one man's family relationships and class struggles. Asking the question "Who is the white working-class?" does not get an easy answer if one at all. Some of Vance's situations as a child are hard to imagine and hard to listen to, but in the end provides an insightful look into an area and culture of a country that has come into play in our politics today.

— Jessica

From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful 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

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis--that of white working-class Americans. 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, 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 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. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their 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.


Product Details ISBN: 9781504734349
ISBN-10: 1504734343
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication Date: June 28th, 2016
Language: English