J.D. Vance's “Hillbilly Elegy,” the surprise best seller published in 2016, is a frisky memoir with a bit of conservative moralizing dangling off, like the price tag on Minnie Pearl's hat. Nearly everyone likes the memoir sections. (His portrait of his grandmother, a “pistol-packing lunatic,” is indelible.) The moralizing has been divisive.
A new anthology, “Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to ‘Hillbilly Elegy,'” edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll, presents the most sustained pushback to Vance's book (soon to be a Ron Howard movie) thus far. It's a volley of intellectual buckshot from high up alongside the hollow.
Vance's book tells the story of his chaotic childhood in Ohio, where part of his extended family migrated from Kentucky's Appalachian region. Some of his brawling, working-class kin are alcoholics, and some are abusers; nearly all are feisty beyond measure.
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