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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think Vance is a con artist. Grandparents with a $100K HHI and a mom who graduated top of her high school class, became a nurse, step dad who made at least $75K as truck driver isn't "working poor." And the town he grew up in in Ohio is STILL a pretty pleasant place. I think he's a smart nerd from Ohio that stole all the content for this book from white trash he saw in Kentucky.

Joined the military to pay for college? No. I think he's a clever nerd that wanted bonafides so he could get into an elite law school, write a book, run for office. The fact that Tiger Mom herself was his mentor at Yale tells you everything.[/quote]

I don't think you read the book. His mom was addicted his entire childhood and did not mother him. His entire family was deeply dysfunctional and traumatized. You can decide he was lying, I suppose, but if you accept that it is a faithful attempt and autobiography you have to accept that his family was very broken.

I am reading Dream Land now, about the rise of opiate addiction in the US and the role of a small town drug-producing town in Mexico and the pain clinic industry - its a good journalistic companion piece to Hillbilly Elegy, I think.[/quote]

I read the book and yes, I think he obviously embellished/exaggerated a lot of it.[/quote]

Not the PP, but I grew up about 20 miles from Middletown, OH (though from an entirely different background)  and, for me anyway, the whole thing went into the category of "Wow, you can't make this sh*t up."

Curious what you think was untrue.[/quote]

He wasn't poor, his town was solid middle class, he had college-educated family, his mom was super smart, she became nurse. That's a long ways from the trailer park.[/quote]

Addiction, PP. Addiction. It doesn't matter if your town is solidly middle class and you don't live in a trailer park. If your mom is addicted to opiates and can't protect and love you, your whole life is going to be f'ed up. And in that town (and in a whole lot of small town America) addiction is pretty prevalent. If you think he is lying about his mom being an addict and his grandparents being pretty abusive and no one really holding jobs...okay. But you seem to simply distrust that his story could be true because you don't think that area is poor enough.[/quote]

Except JD Vance didn't write a memoir about being a child of addiction. He wrote one about being a hillbilly when his immediate family no longer was. [/quote]

Read the book.[/quote]

The book was very much a memoir about addiction.  It was also about the community and culture in which that particular addiction unfolded.

For me, it was a memoir first, and political commentary a distant second.

To the extent he was making a political "point," I took it to be about the passive/victim mindset that is consuming his community of origin.

I read the book as one person's attempt to make sense of his complicated life.  In a way, like Obama's book "Dreams of My Father."

I think people project quite a bit of their own politics or agenda on this book, of course because of the timing with Trump.  But at it's core, it's a memoir.

Others disagree, but I definitely learned a lot.  I grew up on the east coast.  Three generations from dirt-poor immigrants, two generations from tolerable poverty.  But my people started and stayed in NYC for those generations.  They absorbed a different mindset and culture.  It was all active.  You control your future.  Anything you want can be yours (or your children's) with enough risk and hard work, etc.  AND they had exposure and access to all the opportunities NYC had to offer.  They came with nothing, but they saw what was possible.

My sense is Vance's people are a product of their place as much as anything else.  And I found that thought provoking.  What if my great-grandparents had kept moving after Ellis Island and settled where Vance'd people did?  Who would they have become?  Who would I be?

Is this political?  I guess at the end of the day, yes.  Place impacts opportunity and culture, which in turn impact values and behavior, which in turn impact voting preferences, political choices and the direction of this country.  But I felt like the book got there from the bottom up.  Individual - Family - Community - Country.  Not top down.[/quote]

I couldn't agree more. [/quote]

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