A new book on Appalachia gives JD Vance his reckoning

A collection of essays by scholars and activists attempts to reshape our understanding of the southern mountains. Before you fall for the trope of Hillbilly Elegy and Ron Howard’s proposed film adaptation, get a more complex and complete picture from Appalachian Reckoning, says our reviewer.  If footnotes were arrows, J.D. Vance, author of the best-selling Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis, would look like a porcupine once the authors of the new critique of his book and his flawed facts and ideas about Appalachia are finished with him.Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy is chock full of articles by academics and activists who reckon the Silicon Valley venture capitalist cum-spokesman for the Southern mountains is about as clueless about real Appalachian life and real mountain people as that porcupine.  In a review for the Daily Yonder, I labeled Vance’s book an “autobiography” of a young man who grew up in an Ohio steel town far outside the mountains who set out to explain why poor Appalachians voted for Trump and ended up producing nothing more than the story of his family “dysfunction on steroids.”