2016, HarperCollins, NY, 264 pages

Thank you, Ishmael, for this book.

J.D. Vance begins with an apology for writing a memoir at such a young age. But I think it is when they are best written. Our adult life—as J.D. demonstrates—is so molded and modeled by the system we live under as adults that who we are is lost. But as Children, for a while, until the teenage Zombie Apocalypse, we can be real human beings. J.D. made good despite the mountain of cultural and economic obstacles against him and at, 31 is what every head of state wishes his people were, hard working, intelligent, obedient and mainstream.

In large measure Hillbilly Elegy is targeted at whites of the remaining middleclass to tell, them that there is a languishing white underclass every bit as large and dysfunctional as its black counterpart. As a fan of Appalachian culture I thoroughly enjoyed J.D.’s family history, which included his Uncle Teaberry overhearing a young man say he wanted to eat his sister’s panties. To which he went and took a pair of her panties and made the man eat them!

This was truly an excellent book, with a mild, conciliatory, lets pull ourselves up by the bootstraps agenda, which is refreshing in this age of blame-mongering. Many writers, such as myself, can lose sight of the fact that by spreading too much information about how utterly evil the political structure of our country is—that while the average person will react to such anti-system points in brainwashed disbelief—that many of the less capable or less fortunate will react with apathy and give up hope, surrendering to drug addiction.

Mister Vance’s discussion of his religious upbringing and his relationships with the numerous men in his mother’s life was informatively stated, giving the reader an appreciation for what it’s like for a bright young man to be searching for meaning in the cultural context of Rustbelt Ohio and Appalachian Kentucky.

J.D. shows much pride in the military and funerary commitments of his folk, even as the dismay he feels in association with their dissolution befuddles him. He clearly demonstrates that the entitlement mentality is often a feature of rural whites as urban blacks and that property crime is just as high in rural areas. Fortunately for him, he does not seem to have suffered the bad intentions of urban blacks.

There is only one problem I have with this book, that the author seems to have no idea how his people came to be where and what they are. He buys—hook, line and sinker—the popular American proposal that Appalachian Whites are descended only from the willful Scotch-Irish immigrants of the 1700s, when in reality, Appalachian communities were taking hold before their arrival, and that the scorn felt by merchant class and elite English-Americans for the hill folk, immortalized in the term Hillbilly, was establish 100 years before the only large wave of free Gaelic people made their way to America after the Scottish defeat by the British army in 1746. He does not know that many Scotch-Irish slaves escaped to the hills in the 1750s, fleeing Maryland plantations, that before the poor, free Scotch-Irish, came the enslaved English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish, in there tens of thousands, and also that much of the Appalachian cultural resistance to the elite class stems from the same root that urban black distrust of government does, a deep distrust that their ancestors shared with the blacks that replaced them in the fields, and whose descendents still harbor an irrational—though not unfounded—distrust of government.

There is a reason, Mister Vance, why the first ordinance against slavery was passed by Appalachian immigrants pouring into the Ohio Country, and was struck down by the men who drafted the founding documents of this slave nation.

In the article linked below we get a look at the Kentucky Mountain Folk from nearly a century ago. A proud people tend not to dwell on the enslavement of their ancestors. They will, however, maintain a resentment of the political and intellectual/media class, for those classes justify servitude as their civic function.