J.D. Vance grew up in the Rust Belt city of Middletown, Ohio, and the Appalachian town of Jackson, Kentucky. He enlisted in the Marine Corps after high school and served in Iraq. A graduate of the Ohio State University and Yale Law School. In this memoir, he gives an insider's analysis of a culture in crisis. He talks about the struggles of white, working-class American's, as seen through the prism of his own family. His grandparents moved north from Appalachia to escape the poverty that permeated their existence, and provide a better opportunity for their children to move up into the middle class. That worked for them with employment in the steel mills of Ohio. Yet the family struggled with the demands of the middle-class, and Vance chronicles how social and class decline feels like when you grow up in it.
A lot is being written these days on the decline of this segment of the population, and the abuse, poverty, and drug and alcohol abuse so prevalent among this culture. No one has written it in such stark terms, from the viewpoint of one who has lived it and escaped it, albeit with the scars to prove it.
272 pages
