Hillbilly Elegy was half the topic in this morning's previous post.
Sunday long read: "Poor white Americans’ current crisis shouldn’t have caught the rest of the country as off guard as it has."
If you're experiencing a snap judgment of how this interview with Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance is going to read, you're probably mistaken. I was. The best way to correct your assumption is to click through and read the story. Thanks to Bluegill for the link.
Trump: Tribune Of Poor White People, by Rod Dreher (The American Conservative)
I wrote last week about the new nonfiction book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance, the Yale Law School graduate who grew up in the poverty and chaos of an Appalachian clan. The book is an American classic, an extraordinary testimony to the brokenness of the white working class, but also its strengths. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. With the possible exception of Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic, for Americans who care about politics and the future of our country, Hillbilly Elegy is the most important book of 2016. You cannot understand what’s happening now without first reading J.D. Vance. His book does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book did for poor black people: give them voice and presence in the public square.
This interview I just did with Vance in two parts (the final question I asked after Trump’s convention speech) shows why.
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