JD Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy" ignores the real Appalachian crisis it portrays

_{Image by Gage Skidmore from Flickr licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0}

I started reading JD Vance's 2016 memoir "Hillbilly Elegy" on election day, 2020. I didn’t plan it this way. I’d been asked to review the film and I felt that I should read the book beforehand and Tuesday, November 3, 2020 is when the book arrived. Up until then, I had pointedly avoided reading Vance’s memoir, which is back in the news this week after Donald Trump named the now-senator from Ohio as his running mate. I didn’t need to read the book because I had my own experiences with the culture that Vance deemed to be “in crisis.” I was born and raised on top of Muddy Creek Mountain outside of Alderson, West Virginia, a town of less than a thousand people nestled into the Greenbrier River valley just southeast of the coalfields.

From the passionate response pieces that I had read, I was somewhat prepared for the eugenics-tinged genetic arguments that stain the text and the deeply clichéd tropes that strangle the film...