Main Street, Hudson, Ohio, June 14, 2014 (Kenneth Sponsler / Shutterstock.com)Hillbilly Empathy
Hillbilly Elegy is J.D. Vance’s raw, uncensored, personal history of his Scots-Irish family who struggled in Ohio after leaving their Kentucky home. Vance grew up amid domestic strife and a never-ending cycle of new stepfathers, his family weighed down by dwindling economic prospects and drug dependency. A Marine veteran who graduated from Ohio State and Yale Law, Vance considers his upbringing from the vantage point of a San Francisco investment firm, separated by space but not by emotion or memory—or accent. Fraught relationships continue to pull him back to his small-town Ohio roots, and convince him that the pat solutions of the Left and the Right are inadequate to the problems of America’s forgotten and left behind.
