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Hillbilly Elegy

a Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
Oct 30, 2020pateljh rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
This is a first person account of young man without a father and a drug addicted mother growing poor and still making a successful escape from that to become a Yale educated lawyer and now a founder of a company. All throughout the book he laments people make their lives miserable on their own - it is not the fault of the government! Here is a quotation - “There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day. Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents. Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers. I have watched some friends blossom into successful adults and others fall victim in the worst of Middletown’s temptations – premature parenthood, drugs, incarceration. What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It is not your fault that you are a loser; it’s the government’s fault.”