Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The cover image is a stock photo chosen by the published from Getty Images. Oddly, it is fitting for a book whose promotion and title draw heavily from stock and stereotyped images of a region and culture the author knows only vicariously, yet feels qualified to memorialize. As the book is titled and promoted, I would rate it a zero, if I could. It's an unremarkable book about an unremarkable man. If titled, "The Autobiography of J.D. Vance," it would not have been a best-seller. If would not have been published. But, that is what it is. If accurately titled and relieved of the self-serving "insight" borne of an inadequate methodology, it might rate 1 star. "Deer Hunting with Jesus" and autobiographies by Chuck Yeager and Homer Hickam provide better insight, with more integrity. Vance and the publisher may have found a stock image, sprinkled in a few seemingly-forced reference to country music lyrics, and a few citations to lend some heft as sociological insight (which it is not). But, they have not delivered what they have sold - an elegy and a memoir, not just of one family, but of a culture and region. They harvest and exploit the history, heritage, and heartaches of Appalachia just as shamelessly as outsiders have harvested the natural resources and left the people of Appalachia with toxic water, polluted air, shifting and contaminated soil. My WV ancestors choked on the coal dust of the mines, the silica and arsenic of the glass factories, and now my family pours flammable tap water, courtesy of fracking. From afar, with degrees in sociology, business, and law, and a career that actually involved more than 3 months in factories and more than 3 years as an attorney, I'm just choking on the smell of the BS of this book, bristling at the missed opportunity to legitimately explore why the very people with the most to lose under the current administration were some of its most ardent supporters. I don't begrudge Vance for writing his story; but I do resent that he and the publisher package and continue to promote it as a story and insight that it is not. Having been a long-time listener (and having seen in concert) some of the musicians Vance quotes, I can't help but wonder if he simply Googled until he found a few quotes to use, or called up a song or two he overheard someone else playing. He doesn't have to like or know country music to write his own autobiography, of course. But, the more I try to find him credible, the more phony he seems. Admittedly, I'm just an educated, regionally expatriated, hillbilly, homesick for a West Virginia that no longer exists, and lamenting yet another hijacking of our culture. The professors from my top tier law school are less focused on writing their own memoirs and serving as spiritual godmothers to those of their students, and are more focused on writing laws, running campaigns, mooting Supreme Court cases, and serving in administrations. My school made me a practicing attorney. For that, I am grateful. But, I am protective of my profession and the people and places that raised me. Having lived for real a hillbilly to "coastal elite" (barf) arc that Vance claims, I find his disingenuous peddling doubly repugnant. Like the kudzu in the South, Vance's product is invasive, and spreads unabated. I fear that it already has choked off the life of any work that would have offered an authentic memoir of the culture and real people Vance and Harper Collins have sold so widely with a facade cover and title. I would like to think that he one day will choke on regret of how he has betrayed a culture he claims to lament. But, I see no sign that he is capable of that level of introspection...not yet, at least.