'Hillbilly Elegy' filled with cultural insight

   POINT RICHMOND - The tales recounted in J.D. Vance's memoir, Hillbilly Elegy (published in 2016)  can be as disturbing as they sometimes seem farfetched - the stuff of fiction or some badly written television program.
     But Vance's anecdote-packed book is true - at least to the best of his memory. And his memory is good, frequently backed up with research included in this enlightening portrait of growing up in Kentucky and Ohio.
     The full title of the book is Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a family and Culture in Crisis. It sounds almost like an academic study. But Vance's recounting of his growing up is not the stuff of academic tomes. It's real life, gritty, and at times almost too painful to read.

J.D. Vance

    "Teachers didn't tell us that we were too stupid or poor to make it. Nevertheless, it was all around us, like the air we breathed."
     Vance takes the reader on a cultural odyssey through Kentucky and Ohio while talking about growing up. He grew up in an big, extended family which by most measures would be labelled dysfunctional. Yet it worked, sort of, and Vance eventually did a stint in U.S. Marines, and graduated from Ohio State and Yale Law school.
   
     Vance explains in detail how for the hillbilly-Appalachian communities, everything was family.
     Everything.
     Hillbilly Elegy provided some special insights for me, growing up in the Southern Tier of New York State.
     That region, shown in the map below had - and probably still has - a sprinkling of people who resemble folks with the cultural norms and attitudes Vance talks about at length.
     Hillbilly Elegy is Vance's first book, but likely not his last.
     It's on the new book shelf at the Point Richmond library.

(Review by Michael J. Fitzgerald)