Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance and Educated by Tara Westover
Tolstoy said in the opening sentence of Anna Karenina: "All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" and these books vividly lay out two of those ways. Vance was born in a "holler" in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky, he was ultimately raised by his maternal grandparents in Ohio, where they'd moved following job opportunities in the waning years of the Cold War boom the region experienced. His Mom was incapable of and/or unwilling to take responsibility for him (I can't remember what happened to his Dad). Every time she tried her hand at parenting, it was a disaster, due to her drinking, serial infidelity and financial irresponsibility. The rock he tied himself to was really his Grandmother, or Mama, as he called her....who was tough as nails, had a vocabulary like a sailor on shore leave, but was possessed of a strong moral compass, ambition and a work ethic. Anyway, by the end of the journey retraced in Elegy, Vance has been able to get a college degree after a stint in the Marines, which he credits with being a watershed in his life.
Vance does a good job of using his personal story as a segue into an interesting overview of the decline of working-class White America. He highlights the latter's sense of abandonment with the hollowing out of the Industrial Heartland exacerbated, in their eyes, by Obama administration policies. I found it fascinating that many of these folks have been living on the margins, in terms of employment, addictions, family cohesiveness, religious faith, education, etc. for decades. While he doesn't specifically address it, this book opened my eyes to the appeal and ultimate victory of Donald Trump with his nativist, anti-immigrant and anti-foreign trade rhetoric, all neatly summed up in his "Let's make America Great Again" campaign slogan. Intentionally or not (the book was published in late 2016), I believe Vance profiles a large segment of Trump voters very accurately.
Educated, on the other hand, is more intensely personal and much more disturbing. Westover grew up in a family of fundamentalist LDS "preppers" at the base of Buck Mountain, in rural Idaho (both of which may be fictitious, given her disclaimers at the beginning of the book). Dad was radically anti-government, ranting constantly about socialists, the Illuminati and deadly FBI sieges of "plain folks" (actually White Supremacists) like the tragically botched one at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. He and his wife did not get birth certificates for their children, nor did they send them to public schools. The kids weren't really home schooled either, except by the most generous definition of the latter....they picked up enough reading and math at home to be at a rough "survival"-level of proficiency, at best. Mostly, the kids were the family labor force, whether working for Dad in his erratic and dangerous scrap and construction businesses, or helping Mom with midwifery and compounding herbal medicines. So far, so good (I guess), but when you add to this mix Dad's lunatic pursuit of speed and willful disregard for safety in all of his endeavors (he purposely took the seatbelts out of all of their vehicles), his fundamentalist and conspiratorial rants; Mom's agreement, or at least acquiescence, to all of the above and both of their considering modern medicine to be anathema....well, you wind up with a hellish and dangerous environment to grow up in. One kid after another, and then Dad himself, suffers serious injury, near-dismemberment or near-death in horrible, mostly avoidable accidents. The psychological consequences for the children are as bad or worse than the physical. Shawn, the oldest brother, turns out to be a brute and a bully (he's probably manic depressive, just like Tara guesses Dad is). Brother Tyler is the first to flee this nightmare for University, followed by Tara, then Richard.
Tara chronicles her odyssey from a lost and lonesome undergraduate trying to adjust to a pretty conservative version of the modern world at BYU, through her PhD at Cambridge...an even sharper cultural contrast. Every time her family reappears, the outcome is predictable: a disaster either has happened or is about to. By the end of the book, she seems to have jettisoned, or at least learned to work around, most of the baggage her upbringing saddled her with and is a successful academic.
I'd recommend Hillbilly Elegy to anyone seeking a deeper understanding of populism and the Trump phenomenon, both tied to the plight of those stranded by the de-industrialization of America, trying to reclaim what they've lost by whatever means they can. Educated, on the other hand, is best read in conjunction with Krakauer's "Under the Banner of Heaven" and, possibly Fawn Brodie's "No Man Know's My History" for insights into a pretty wacko American ecosystem still alive and dysfunctional out in corners of the Mountain West. It's basically a chronicle of growing up in a family that's a toxic amalgam of mental illness, weird religion and paranoid, conspiracy-theory politics.
