Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy
Book details
Summary
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Weatherford Award winner, nonfiction
With hundreds of thousands of copies sold, a Ron Howard movie in the works, and the rise of its author as a media personality, J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis has defined Appalachia for much of the nation. What about Hillbilly Elegy accounts for this explosion of interest during this period of political turmoil? Why have its ideas raised so much controversy? And how can debates about the book catalyze new, more inclusive political agendas for the region’s future?
Appalachian Reckoning is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow Hillbilly Elegy has cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond Hillbilly Elegy to allow Appalachians from varied backgrounds to tell their own diverse and complex stories through an imaginative blend of scholarship, prose, poetry, and photography. The essays and creative work collected in Appalachian Reckoning provide a deeply personal portrait of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. Complicating simplistic visions that associate the region almost exclusively with death and decay, Appalachian Reckoning makes clear Appalachia’s intellectual vitality, spiritual richness, and progressive possibilities.
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This book is a crucial response to "Appalachian Reckoning," one that unfortunately won't get as much publicity and review as the book whose failings it addresses.
This is a loving and clear-eyed volume that tells the real stories of Appalachia, a place I love, a place that raised me, a place for whom I have the deepest respect - unlike JD Vance.
Buy this book. Pay attention to its pages. Learn from its varied truths. You will be enriched when you do.
The many and varied perspectives each address a different component of a larger story. It is clear-eyed and intelligent.
There is nothing to dislike here, except the fact that it won't get the huge publicity boost that 'Appalachian Reckoning' has gotten.