Sunday "must read": Aaron Renn's review of Hillbilly Elegy.

It isn't a reinvention of the wheel to observe that in the more capable of hands, boilerplate constructions like obituaries, ballgame recaps and book reviews (among others) can become probing, insightful essays in their own right, ranging beyond the expected into complementary areas of inquiry.

Aaron Renn's review of Hillbilly Elegy moved the book's author, J.D, Vance, to acknowledge Renn in a tweet: "Thanks to Aaron for a thoughtful review (not entirely positive, btw, but I learned something in reading it)."

You get the conclusion ...

Hillbilly Elegy nevertheless remains remarkable for its first-person portrayal of Appalachian culture from someone who has affection for its people—indeed, still sees them as his people—but also the courage to admit its flaws. The larger problems come less from the book itself than from the way in which educated readers have seized on it to confirm their own negative impressions of the white working class—and, by extension, to flatter the superiority of their own cultural values and their sense of moral entitlement to the success they enjoy.

... and the opening paragraph. Don't stop here. Read it.

Culture, Circumstance, and Agency: Reflections on Hillbilly Elegy, by Aaron M. Renn (City-Journal)

In his bestselling new memoir Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance takes a blended view, recognizing the role of economic and personal circumstances in poverty and life dysfunction but also stressing the way that the culture of his own working-class Appalachian tribe has crippled its response to life’s challenges. He comes down firmly on the side of individual agency and the ability of people to overcome obstacles through hard work and adopting the cultural habits of successful groups. He writes, “This book is about something else: what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It’s about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.” And: “The truth is hard, and the hardest truths for hill people are the ones they must tell about themselves.”

Sunday long read redux: "For Americans who care about politics and the future of our country, Hillbilly Elegy is the most important book of 2016."

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.

Sunday long read: "Poor white Americans’ current crisis shouldn’t have caught the rest of the country as off guard as it has."

Nothing glib out of me. Just read. A teaser appears here.

The Original Underclass: Poor white Americans’ current crisis shouldn’t have caught the rest of the country as off guard as it has, by Alec MacGillis and Propublica (The Atlantic)

Two new books—one a provocative, deeply researched history and the other an affecting memoir—are well timed to help make better sense of the plight of struggling whites in the United States. Both accounts converge on an important insight: The gloomy state of affairs in the lower reaches of white America should not have caught the rest of the country as off guard as it has—and mobilizing solutions for the crisis will depend partly on closing the gaps that allowed for such obliviousness.

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
By Nancy Isenberg

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
By J. D. Vance

Sometime during the past few years, the country started talking differently about white Americans of modest means. Early in the Obama era, the ennobling language of campaign pundits prevailed. There was much discussion of “white working-class voters,” with whom the Democrats, and especially Barack Obama, were having such trouble connecting. Never mind that this overbroad category of Americans—the exit pollsters’ definition was anyone without a four-year college degree, or more than a third of the electorate—obliterated major differences in geography, ethnicity, and culture. The label served to conjure a vast swath of salt-of-the-earth citizens living and working in the wide-open spaces between the coasts—Sarah Palin’s “real America”—who were dubious of the effete, hifalutin types increasingly dominating the party that had once purported to represent the common man. The “white working class” connoted virtue and integrity. A party losing touch with it was a party unmoored.