Posted on 07/29/2016 2:17:54 PM PDT by oblomov
J.D. Vance didn’t encounter anyone else with a personal story like his when he arrived at Yale Law School six years ago. His early family life in a poor town in eastern Ohio was tough, with a mother who became a drug addict and a partially absent father. He and his sister spent a lot of time with his grandparents, evangelical Christians who were originally from Kentucky and inspired Mr. Vance to do more with his life.
His experiences are the basis of his new memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” The book started out as a quest to answer questions about his own upbringing but developed into a broader conversation about social divisions in the U.S. and feelings of disenfranchisement among the white working class.
Now a principal at an investment firm in San Francisco, Mr. Vance, 31, decided to start writing a memoir while he was at Yale, feeling like he was “culturally foreign.” “I’m a straight, white, conservative male, and I’d never felt out of place in my entire life. But I did at this weird educational institution, and I started to ask myself why,” he says. “Why is it that there aren’t many people—or any people—from a background like mine at places like Yale?”
He describes how his mother got pregnant at 18, was divorced by 19 and remarried four times. She got angry at him one time when he was 11 and threatened to crash the car they were riding in and kill them both. (When reached for comment by The Wall Street Journal, his mother confirmed the book’s account.)
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
The cultural divide in the US has widened markedly over the past 20 years. Just being at FR makes me a class traitor.
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Those are not unlike the dynamics that existed in the country and led to the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828.
White, male, and straight - VERY much out of fashion these days.
The hipsters now are all black, female, homosexual - or pretending to be.
I don't see Trump so much the beneficiary of the festering resentment as Hillary the arrogant, tone-deaf bully about to run into a haymaker. She'll never know.
ping
“Those are not unlike the dynamics that existed in the country and led to the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828.”
+1
But the truth of the matter is that without the working white class the socialist’s house of cards would fold and they’d be SOL and begging us to bail them out. The left is just composed of big whiney wienie babies with no spine and no integrity
Try being a straight, Christian, Southern lady. Everybody always assumes I’m racist because I’m Southern, and just because I speak with a drawl people think I’m stupid. When I went to college at the University of South Carolina, the pop-culture stereotypes I had to try to live down were Daisy Duke and Elly Mae Clampet.
Yale doesnt want diversity. They want socialist conformity.
What amazes me is that someone only 31 years old would think it’s important to write a memoir. I mean you’ve barely started your life, right? Well, if our president can write a pair of phony autobiographies at a similar age, I suppose it’s ok for the rest of us.
What they want is much like what some corporations want these days:
an external appearance of diversity but absolute homogeneity in cognitive processing.
Thanks for posting this review. I just checked this book out from the library. I’ll start reading it tonight.
I disagree with his idea that schools should be more cognizant of student’s home lives, and instead we need to be discouraging out of wedlock childbirth if not requiring long term contraception for those who have one out of wedlock baby to stop the tendency of those women having more children than the married women.
If white men had privilege, Shaun King wouldn’t have pretended to be black.
>>> Just being at FR makes me a class traitor. <<<
No, I makes you an American! One who gets it.
Never give up - never surrender.
My copy is in the mail from Amazon. I can’t wait to read it...My family took the hillbilly highway to Ohio years ago and now I find myself back here trying to good for my people. Public policy can’t fix what is wrong here.
Excellent point about Shaun King.
. “Why is it that there aren’t many people—or any people—from a background like mine at places like Yale?”
Ahh gee, because they’re purposely putting white males to the back of the bus?
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