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Hillbilly Elegy
- A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
- Narrated by: J. D. Vance
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
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Publisher's summary
Winner, 2017 APA Audie Awards - Nonfiction
From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class.
Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis - that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over 40 years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.
The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.'s grandparents were "dirt poor and in love" and moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility.
But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance's grandparents, his aunt, his uncle, his sister, and most of all his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history.
A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.
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We raise our children to be independent and lead fulfilling lives, but when they finally do, staying close becomes more complicated than ever. And for every bewildered mother who wonders why her children don't call, there is a frustrated son or daughter who just wants to be treated like a grownup. Now, renowned editor Jane Isay delivers the perfect gift to both parents and their adult children-real-life wisdom and advice on how to stay together without falling apart.
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Disappointed
- By tammy alvarez on 01-13-19
By: Jane Isay
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Have a New Teenager by Friday
- From Mouthy and Moody to Respectful and Responsible in 5 Days
- By: Kevin Leman
- Narrated by: Kirby Heybourne
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Congratulations! You have a teenager in your home. Life will never quite be the same again (of course, you already know that). But it can be better than you’ve ever dreamed. In fact, you’re just five days away from your teenager asking, “What can I do to help?” Guaranteed! With his signature wit and commonsense psychology, internationally recognized family expert and New York Times best-selling author Dr. Kevin Leman will help you. your teenager’s life. With Dr. Leman’s instinct and insight, plus an index with gutsy advice on 75 hot-button issues that keep parents up at night.
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Listen with a Critical Mind
- By Stephanie on 03-25-13
By: Kevin Leman
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Normal Gets You Nowhere
- By: Kelly Cutrone
- Narrated by: Kelly Cutrone
- Length: 3 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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With Normal Gets You Nowhere, Kelly Cutrone invites us to get our freak on. History is full of successful, world-changing people who did not fit in. Think Nelson Mandela, Joan of Arc, Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, John Lennon, and Rosa Parks. Instead of changing themselves to accommodate the status quo or what others thought they should be, these people hung a light on their differences - and changed humanity in the process. “I know you don’t feel normal, so why are you trying to act it and prove to everyone you are?” Cutrone says.
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For open minds and hearts.
- By Kelly on 01-06-12
By: Kelly Cutrone
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Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
- Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids
- By: Meghan Daum
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller, Jo Anna Perrin
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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One of the main topics of cultural conversation during the last decade was the supposed "fertility crisis" and whether modern women could figure out a way to have it all - a successful, demanding career and the required 2.3 children - before their biological clocks stopped ticking. Now, however, conversation has turned to whether it's necessary to have it all (see Anne-Marie Slaughter) or, perhaps more controversial, whether children are really a requirement for a fulfilling life.
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Am I the only sane childfree woman in here?
- By J. Malouin on 09-29-15
By: Meghan Daum
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When They Call You a Terrorist
- A Black Lives Matter Memoir
- By: Patrisse Cullors, asha bandele, Angela Davis - foreword
- Narrated by: Angela Davis - foreword, Angela Davis, Patrisse Cullors
- Length: 6 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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When They Call You a Terrorist is the essential audiobook for every conscientious American. From one of the cofounders of the Black Lives Matter movement comes a poetic audiobook memoir and reflection on humanity. Necessary and timely, Patrisse Cullors' story asks us to remember that protest in the interest of the most vulnerable comes from love.
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Everyone should listen!
- By Mary J. Bunker on 01-26-18
By: Patrisse Cullors, and others
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To Obama
- A Diary of a Nation
- By: Jeanne Marie Laskas
- Narrated by: Jeanne Marie Laskas, Sullivan Jones, MacLeod Andrews, and others
- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Every evening for eight years, at his request, President Obama was given 10 handpicked letters written by ordinary American citizens - the unfiltered voice of a nation - from his Office of Presidential Correspondence. He was the first president to interact daily with constituent mail and to archive it in its entirety. In To Obama, Jeanne Marie Laskas interviews President Obama, the letter writers themselves, and the White House staff who sifted through the powerful, moving, and incredibly intimate narrative of America during the Obama years:
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a must have audible book or print, it will amaze u
- By 1mercedeb8 on 11-08-18
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The Pursuit of Happyness (Abridged)
- By: Chris Gardner
- Narrated by: Andre Blake
- Length: 5 hrs and 42 mins
- Abridged
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At the age of 20, Chris Gardner arrived in San Francisco to pursue a promising career in medicine. However, he surprised everyone and himself by setting his sights on the competitive world of high finance. Yet no sooner had he landed an entry-level position at a prestigious firm, Gardner found himself caught in a web of incredibly challenging circumstances that left him part of the city's working homeless with his toddler son.
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Very Good Story!
- By Lito Da Critic on 06-02-06
By: Chris Gardner
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Modern Loss
- Candid Conversation About Grief. Beginners Welcome.
- By: Rebecca Soffer, Gabrielle Birkner
- Narrated by: Meredith Mitchell, Josh Bloomberg
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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At a time when we mourn public figures and national tragedies with hashtags, where intimate posts about loss go viral and we receive automated birthday reminders for dead friends, it's clear we are navigating new terrain without a road map. Let's face it: Most of us have always had a difficult time talking about death and sharing our grief. We're awkward and uncertain; we avoid, ignore, or even deny feelings of sadness; we offer platitudes; we send sympathy bouquets whittled out of fruit.
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Not What I Was Expecting
- By Bessie Mae on 03-01-23
By: Rebecca Soffer, and others
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It Was All a Dream
- A New Generation Confronts the Broken Promise to Black America
- By: Reniqua Allen
- Narrated by: Shayna Small
- Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Reniqua Allen tells the stories of Black millennials searching for a better future in spite of racist policies that have closed off traditional versions of success. Many watched their parents and grandparents play by the rules, only to sink deeper and deeper into debt. They witnessed their elders fight to escape cycles of oppression for more promising prospects, largely to no avail. Today, in this post-Obama era, they face a critical turning point. Interweaving her own experience, Allen shares surprising stories of hope and ingenuity.
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Great statistics and facts
- By Eve on 05-18-19
By: Reniqua Allen
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The Gift of Our Wounds
- A Sikh and a Former White Supremacist Find Forgiveness After Hate
- By: Pardeep Singh Kaleka, Arno Michaelis, Robin Gaby Fisher
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne, John McLain
- Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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When white supremacist Wade Michael Page murdered six people and wounded four in a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin in 2012, Pardeep Kaleka was devastated. The temple leader, now dead, was his father. His family, who had immigrated to the US from India when Pardeep was young, had done everything right. Why was this happening to him? Arno Michaelis, a former skinhead and founder of one of the largest racist skinhead organizations in the world, knew he had to take action and fight against the very crimes he used to commit.
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The Gift
- By M. Forsberg on 07-29-22
By: Pardeep Singh Kaleka, and others
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To the End of June
- The Intimate Life of American Foster Care
- By: Cris Beam
- Narrated by: Susan Ericksen
- Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Who are the children of foster care? What, as a country, do we owe them? Cris Beam, a foster mother herself, spent five years immersed in the world of foster care looking into these questions and tracing firsthand stories. The result is To the End of June, an unforgettable portrait that takes us deep inside the lives of foster children in their search for a stable, loving family. Beam shows us the intricacies of growing up in the system - the back-and-forth with agencies, the rootless shuffling between homes, the emotionally charged tug between foster and birth parents.
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Good dissertation
- By Nim on 03-13-19
By: Cris Beam
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The Meaning of Matthew
- My Son's Murder in Laramie, and a World Transformed
- By: Judy Shepard
- Narrated by: Judy Shepard
- Length: 5 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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The mother of Matthew Shepard shares her story about her son's death and the choice she made to become an international gay rights activist.
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Heart breaking story
- By sherry on 08-10-12
By: Judy Shepard
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After rising from poverty to earn two Ivy League degrees, an Appalachian lawyer pays tribute to the strong "hill women" who raised and inspired her, and whose values have the potential to rejuvenate a struggling region - an uplifting and eye-opening memoir for fans of Hillbilly Elegy and Educated.
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In this book (previously published as Crippled America), we're going to look at the state of the world right now. It's a terrible mess, and that's putting it mildly. There has never been a more dangerous time. The politicians and special interests in Washington, DC, are directly responsible for the mess we are in. So why should we continue listening to them?
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Shyima Hall was born in Egypt on September 29, 1989, the seventh child of desperately poor parents. When she was eight, her parents sold her into slavery. Shyima then moved two hours away to Egypt's capitol city of Cairo to live with a wealthy family and serve them eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. When she was ten, her captors moved to Orange County, California, and smuggled Shyima with them. Two years later, an anonymous call from a neighbor brought about the end of Shyima's servitude - but her journey to true freedom was far from over.
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Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship. Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own.
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Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent. When another brother got himself into college, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University.
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Olivetti
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Being a typewriter is not as easy as it looks. Surrounded by books (notorious attention hogs) and recently replaced by a computer, Olivetti has been forgotten by the Brindles—the family he’s lived with for years. The Brindles are busy humans, apart from twelve-year-old Ernest, who would rather be left alone with his collection of Oxford English Dictionaries. Once a collector of words, now Olivetti only collects dust. He gets a rare glimpse of action from Ernest’s mom, Beatrice—his used-to-be frequent visitor—only for her to drop him off at Heartland Pawn Shop and leave him behind.
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Absolutely brilliant!
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Pulse
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In a gay nightclub in Orlando on June 12, 2016, the shooter, Omar Mateen, murdered 49 people and wounded 53 others. The attack was the deadliest act of violence against the LGBTQ+ community in US history and the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11. But there’s a story you haven’t heard. The FBI had a secret history with the shooter and his father. To obscure that history, the FBI pushed a false story that the media dutifully carried—that the attacker was a secretly gay Islamist extremist who had chosen to target Pulse and planned the attack for weeks.
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Summary, Analysis, and Review of J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy
- A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis
- By: Start Publishing Notes
- Narrated by: Michael Gilboe
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Overall
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J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy is a memoir about his life growing up in Ohio as the child of a working-class family with roots in Appalachia. Vance uses his experiences in a dysfunctional family to talk about the problems with what he calls hillbilly culture. He says that hillbilly culture is mired in laziness, drug use, and learned helplessness. Hillbillies claim to be committed to hard work, but Vance believes they actually refuse to work at available jobs, miring them in poverty.
What listeners say about Hillbilly Elegy
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Carole T.
- 07-05-16
Making Sense
In a recent NY Times column, conservative intellectual David Brooks recommended this book as offering insight into a mystery of recent political trends in the United States (and, to an extent, in other parts of the Western world). Why do so many angry, disaffected, lower-to-middle class white people vote in a seemingly irrational manner that often appears even to be against their own self-interest?
J.D. Vance is an ivy league-educated young lawyer with a particularly good background for exploring the anger and rage that has led to such upheaval in recent elections. He was born in Eastern Kentucky's hill country and then moved with his family to the industrial rust belt of the midwest.
In claiming this "hillbilly" background, Vance attempts to make sense of (if not excuses for) a culture that has lost its way and is feeling left out of what used to be seen as the American birthright of optimism and high expectations for the future.
Vance's family story is at times hilarious, often appalling, and ultimately heartbreaking. His affection for his fiercely loyal but very flawed mother, grandparents (you will never forget "Mamaw" and "Papaw"!) and extended family is obvious and to be commended. Yet his personal success and years away from that culture give him a clear view of the toll that geographic displacement, economic failure, lack of education, and drugs have taken on an increasingly helpless and hopeless portion of the population.
As a technologically advanced nation, we have to find a way to reach out to and bring along those who are feeling disaffected. Everyone agrees on that. "Hillbilly Elegy" doesn't tell us how to accomplish this task, but it gives us a much-needed glimpse inside the problem.
These are real people with a rich history in this country - people of value and sensibility - and they need help. Trying to understand them is the very least we can do, and J.D. Vance helps us get there.
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105 people found this helpful
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- Charles
- 10-24-16
Relevant
Not having Appalachian heritage but growing up in Appalachian Ohio this book articulated so many patterns I've seen in my own communities. While the book does not offer solutions for the problems that face these communities, it names them and that is an important first step for progress. The book also gives a face to the working class and humanizes folks who have been "othered" for far too long.
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40 people found this helpful
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- AA
- 04-15-19
I was prepared to hate this book...
After reading the sanctimonious "Republican Like Me," I expected this book to be another thinly veiled swipe at the ignorance of the classless middle class. I could not have been more mistaken. With some differences, this book could be the story of my life. The story of how my mother's life choices impacted her children. How the stabilizing presence of my Grannie, who never cursed and read the bible to her grandchildren every night, gave me enough support to make a different life for my self. Some of us overcome, some do not. The journey takes hard work and good role models. I am lucky.
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15 people found this helpful
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- KP
- 12-10-16
Uplifting, Informative, and Astute.
I loved Hillbilly Elegy. The genius of this book was the author’s ability to blend his very personal story with a sociological and psychological look at this hillbilly part of the American culture and how it has developed. So while the book is academic in its analysis, it is also personal and really interesting as J.D. Vance describes his life and how and, most importantly, WHY he was able to rise above it.
I had the same feelings I had in Sonia Sotomayor’s autobiography because both of these people were able to beat the odds and rise above the poverty and chaos into which they were born. It is so gratifying and heartwarming to read stories like that. Sonia Sotomayor was mentioned in the book because she spoke at J.D. Vance’s graduation from Yale law school.
At the end of the book J.D. Vance gives his ideas for how our society can better deal with the problems of poverty and cultural detachment from which this area of the country is suffering. His ideas are not easy fixes and may never happen, but they are really thought provoking and come from a deep inner knowledge of the world about which he writes.
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12 people found this helpful
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- Andreanna
- 09-10-19
well written, thought provoking, authentic
Wow, this is the best book I've listened to in a long time. J.D. weaves the story of his life together artfully with a captivating story, while interspersing it with thoughtful musings of broad sociological perspectives and understanding. He has a very authentic voice and it is inspiring to see him learn and grow, and accomplish more than he'd ever expected. The tone of his memoir is humble, thoughtful, and very evenly measured. I am a very sociologically minded person, and this story helped me gain a more personal understanding of the issues, attitudes, and ideologies of the working class whites of rural America. The thing I appreciate and respect most about J.D. is how he deeply approaches the subject and challenges of his people from various angles. He does not condemn, and he does not justify. He speaks of his childhood trauma without blaming or complaining, gives credit to his grandparents and acknowledges the vast family support network he had, and takes responsibility for his personal setbacks and for creating the life he achieves for himself. I believe more balanced views such as this would really enhance the political spectrum.
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11 people found this helpful
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- Adam
- 02-12-17
American Classic
I know this story because I lived it. Great American story, ranks with Grapes of Wrath. Semper Fi JD.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Blair L. Murray
- 10-21-16
This is a story that rings true and offers great insight.
This parallels life in a small southern town in many respects, with the role of organized religion playing a more significant stabilizing part. Also, there seems to be more opportunity to escape from the snares of the hometown "trap" -- early marriage, settling for a routine job, bad diet, no real prospects, seeing your small town age and decay around you. Those who were trapped in poverty tended to go west rather than north, and seemed to find themselves in a better situation than the hillbillies who moved to what is now the rust belt. I am from a couple of generation earlier than J. D., but the story and the observation struck a chord that I can relate to. From one vet to another, thank you J.D. For your service.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Christine
- 08-18-16
Thank you for opening my eyes
Thank you J.D. for opening my eyes to the Hillbilly world and providing me, a 3rd generation Mexican American, a perspective that I never acknowledged. Our childhood struggles are similar and I found your book to be enlightening and relatable. I loved all of the psychological research you provided in your book on how childhood experience impacts our adult life. Thank you!
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- Tyler Smith
- 02-03-17
A must read
I lived on the Kentucky border in northeast Tennessee for a couple years and wish I had read this book first. The stories, the people, even their names are scarily accurate. This could have been written about Oneida Tennessee. A must read for everyone to understand our country right now, why Trump got elected, why race is a complicated stigma but poverty and lack of parental stability are far more pressing issues. It raises questions that we all need to ask in order to start dialogues which our country needs to have.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Katie Precone
- 08-26-16
Must listen
This book made me laugh and cry. (Sometimes in the same paragraph). A great examination of some very current issues with insight into the current political mess that we find ourselves in. But that is not the core of this story. Provides insight into the hurtful family dynamics that are not exclusive to the hillbilly culture. Having the book read by the author makes it all the more powerful
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4 people found this helpful