A welcome and valuable resource for anyone studying or writing about this much-maligned region.
Appalachian writers and scholars rebut the “gross simplifications and stereotypes” of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016).
Often cited as a way to understand the working-class voters who helped elect Donald Trump, Hillbilly Elegy has been a longtime bestseller, will soon become an HBO movie, and has made Vance a media expert on Appalachia. Indeed, it is the most widely read book on the region. Now comes this thoughtful and provocative anthology of essays, poems, and photographs arguing for treatment of Appalachia as a “diverse and complex place.” Edited by Harkins (History/Western Kentucky Univ.; Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon, 2003) and McCarroll (Writing and Rhetoric/Bowdoin Coll.; Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film, 2018), the book ranges widely in its single focus, with contributors variously attacking, defending, or simply critiquing the book. All deem Hillbilly a biased work reinforcing stereotypes of the region’s people (snake handlers, mountain men) as understood by a conservative Kentuckian born into a poor, unstable family who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, attended Yale Law School, and became a venture capitalist. The result, writes Tennessee historian T.R.C. Hutton, is “a Silicon Valley millionaire [who] is now the most popular source for understanding twenty-first century rural poverty.” In other pieces, Kentucky sociologist Dwight B. Billings calls the memoir an ad for “capitalist neoliberalism,” and California law professor Lisa Pruitt, who is “from hillbilly stock,” finds it reminiscent of her childhood but filled with “ill-informed policy prescriptions.” Like others, she believes systemic societal problems—not only personal choice and accountability—help shape regional life. Vance’s defenders say he is entitled to his personal story and to his interpretation of his early social environment. Writer Ivy Brashear, a 10th-generation Appalachian, notes that the book lacks class, heart, and warmth. Others offer nuanced considerations of race, sexuality, and drug use.
A welcome and valuable resource for anyone studying or writing about this much-maligned region.Pub Date: March 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-946684-79-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: West Virginia Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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