Book Bags: a book club

Welcome to our new Book Club organized by community members. The club will meet the 1st Friday of each month @ 2 p.m.
December book: "Hillbilly Elegy"  by JD Vance

Synopsis: taken from www.amazon.comFrom 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 classHillbilly 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 forty 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, aunt, uncle, 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.Image from: https:/amazon.com