From a former sea and Yale Law School graduate, an excellent 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 the culture in crisis-that of white working-class Us citizens. 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 hasn’t about Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Lifestyle in Problems before been discussed as searingly from the within. J. D. Vance tells the true story of just what a public, 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 shifted north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They elevated a middle-class family, and finally their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Regulation School, a typical marker of their success in attaining generational upward mobility.

But mainly because the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that is only the short, superficial edition. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, primarily, his mother, battled profoundly using the needs of their brand-new middle-class lifestyle, and were under no circumstances able to fully get away the legacy of mistreatment, alcoholism, poverty, and stress so characteristic of their section of America. Vance piercingly displays how he himself still carries round the demons of their chaotic family history.

A deeply moving memoir with its talk about of humor and vividly colorful statistics, Hillbilly Elegy may be the tale of how upward mobility actually feels. And it is an urgent and troubling yoga on the loss of the American fantasy for a large segment of this country.