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Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance
An autobiography from a man who graduated from Yale Law School, but who came from a "Hillbilly background". His family were "white working poor" in Ohio by way of Kentucky, and considered themselves Kentuckyians.
I made immediate UK comparisons to those people disparagingly described here as "chavs" or "the underclass" - same sort of thing.
His childhood was filled with violence, family disputes and addiction and he is particularly damning of his mother, who, though her own childhood was marked by similar violence and an alcoholic father had the same two parents growing up.
In Vance's case, he had a steady stream of Daddy figures, lasting five minutes each, including an adoptive father who vanished shortly after the adoption.
Here, he wrestles with what if anything made him a success, and not another statistic.
Eventually it boils down to only a few factors
In his final few years of high school, he experienced peace and security living with his grandmother, Mamaw who repeatedly kept him out of foster care.
Subsequently the Marine Corps gave him basic life skills that he had lacked or never been shown.
After entering Yale, an alien world, he realised that the difference for the elites is the capital that they have in their contact network. He then became part of that network.
The book cover does annoy me though :
"A Profound Insight Into Trump and Brexit"
"The Political Book Of The Year"
This is not what this book is. Neither Trump nor Brexit is ever mentioned, nor the correlation between right wing voting and the white working class.
Nor is it a political book. In fact, the only time politics is mentioned is when the author says his grandfather voted Reagan once because he hated the Democratic candidate at the time, but was otherwise a true Democrat.
Any links to that agenda are tenuous and tangential.
Instead what this is is an autobiography were one man muses on what made him the exception to the rule.
It was good and I enjoyed it, and would recommend, however it probably wont make "bold on the list"