Hillbilly Elegy

JD Vance does a nice job of story-telling in this book about his hillbilly family and their cultural origins. He really gives a voice to his people that we “urban elites” are unlikely to have seen firsthand. Though I felt like I understood where he was coming from for a variety of personal reasons, the reality is I did not experience anywhere near the level of dysfunction that his family & their peers did. One question that he managed to answer for me in this book – why don’t the people in these going-nowhere towns just leave? I guess their reasoning is that their home equity is negative. While I don’t know if this is logically sound, it does help me empathize with their position. (View on Amazon)