I've been coming back to this book in the wake of Vance's title resurfacing this year. I feel it's the perfect remedy to that person's rhetoric, and offers real insight into the heart of Appalachia.

I really liked the diversity of voices and experiences in this book, which is a direct response to the Hillbilly Elegy that got way too much attention when it came out. One of my criticisms of HE is the lack of broad perspective that is so vital to understanding Appalachian communities and experiences. This book counters that beautiful. I think that some of the more high level rambling will alienate some readers, but overall this is the perfect book to do the job it set out to do. If people want to talk about hillbilly elegy, we need to acknowledge the diversity that is erased in the flattening of that memoir. It is fine to write your own memoir, but not to position yourself as a singular expert and vital voice in a large conversation that should bring a lot of nuance. Appalachian Reckoning does the work to bring more experiences to the table so that we can actually have the conversation we need to have about this region, poverty, environmental exploitation, corporate extraction, and lack of resources, including hope and opportunity.

Thank you NetGalley and West Virginia University press for a free ARC in exchange for and honest review. This book is a collection of essays and poems written in response to Hillbilly Elegy. These were meant to dispel some of the stereotypes that are perpetuated in Hillbilly Elegy. While I can appreciate the response, there is a lot of truth in Hillbilly Elegy. If you have lived in the impoverished areas of Appalachian, you can unfortunately, see that some of the stereotypes are not baseless.

What a fantastic book to read, especially if you have read Hillbilly elegy and/or familiar with those parts of the nation. I felt like this book was well put together and its pieces were well written responses. I enjoyed reading this book and it made me think about my own culture more.

I'd had mixed feelings when reading Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, so was really excited to see this collection and the diversity of contributions it made to the discussion. I found myself engaging more with the lengthier essays, and didn't connect so much with many of the poetry and photography entries. It was a joy to do a deep dive into this topic, and learn more about Appalachian literature and regional history, and regardless of where your views sit personally, I think there is something in these essays for everyone.

I was actually unable to finish this book. I knew from the subtitle that these essays were written (collected) in response to Vance's very popular book, Hillbilly Elegy. I did not realize, however, how much of the content would be less "response" than attack on Vance's premise and popularity. I was eager to read another take on poverty in this region, but I tired quickly of the negativity. It's certainly possible that later essays contained alternatives and rebuttal, but the early essays seemed more personal attacks on Vance's rise from poverty to Silicon Valley elite (something that was mentioned MANY times) to popular writer & speaker. Vance's book certainly evokes emotional responses, and not all of them are positive, but this book left me annoyed. Rather than presenting a compelling opposite point of view, it almost smacked of jealousy.

Having grown up near Middletown, Ohio where Vance grew up I was very interested in his memoir. So I was equally interested in reading this "rebuttal". This was much more academic than I expected and some of the articles I could not even finish, partly because of the vitriol. That isn't a comment on whether I agreed with the writer's position just that it was heavy reading and quite negative. Overall this is not a book for those who enjoyed or could relate to "Hillbilly Ellegy" but certainly gives a different perspective to the essay.

I had never heard of Hillbilly Elegy. (I must have been living under a rock or something.) When Appalachian Reckoning showed up on my Netgalley list, I was instantly interested. The subject matter is incredibly close to my heart. I looked up Hillbilly Elegy and read some synopses. I was aggravated. My family made the same diaspora from Appalachia to the Rust Belt during the Great Depression. They moved into the very town Vance worked his way out of. They lead incredibly similar lives, but we came to very different conclusions on how to handle our situations.

I was very interested to read responses from others who live in the same region. Were others as offended with Vance's representation as I was, or did I stand alone? Well, honestly, I got a little more than I bargained for in Appalachian Reckoning. The first half of the book is a collection of response essays of an academic nature. The second half is more personal responses in all kinds of literary formats.

The high brow academic section was exhaustive to read. Lots of citations and little heart. While it was more than I was looking to read at the time, it was exactly as to be expected with a collection of academic essays. I was more impressed with the second half of the book. All in all, various authors made excellent points for and against the concepts Vance preaches to his readers.

The appeal of reading the responses from people who come from the same place and have led similar lives is just human nature. That sense of connectivity is something we all seek. I was drawn to this collection by its subject and relativity to my life. I kept reading because of the social questions it raised and the intellectual conversation it sparked.

My brain needed a good workout after lots of fiction reading. Appalachian Reckoning provided. This book certainly isn't for everyone, but it should make everyone who takes the time to read it think a great deal on how human nature works.

I read what I could It's not a bad book It's Just not what I am interested in reading about! For someone else and this subject,it is a great book! I am sorry I didn't finish it but a friend of mine did and she said it was very informative and enjoyed the story of people we hardly ever get to met!! The different ways these people in the mountains live their lives,the stories they have are so different than where we are!

Not what I expected at all. I love the mountain lore and thought I was getting a story. Not a fan.

Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds To Hillbilly Elegy
Edited By: Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll
West Virginia University Press
NonFiction (Adult) Politics
Pub. Date 1 March 2019
Pages 432
#Appalachianreckoning#NetGalley
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I am not sure how to go about reviewing this book. This is actually the first book I have ever DNFed.
I decided to do this at 40%. I had a hard time reading this book because all it did was bashed Vance about his Memoirs. I have read Hillbilly Elegy and I never thought of things these editors are talking about. I have a hard time of people bashing someone memoirs. Memoirs are how people feel and from their point of view. I know by looking at the ratings on Good Reads I am the only one who feels this way. I really don't want to bash these editors so I will leave it at this. Sorry but I just couldn't continue.

APPALACHIAN RECKONING: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy is edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll. Describing this as a "book born out of frustration ... a book born out of hope," the editors set out to gather essays, images and poetry to respond to J. D. Vance's bestselling (and soon to be movie) Hillbilly Elegy. Harkins is a professor of history at Western Kentucky University and McCarroll is the director of writing and rhetoric at Bowdoin College. Both have written extensively about Appalachia, but this collection is a bit uneven, ranging from overly scholarly responses to personal stories. Harkins and McCarroll split the book into two sections, with the first part offering selections "directly assessing or commenting on the words and impact of Vance's influential work." Part II is titled "Beyond Hillbilly Elegy" and they say, "there is no singular focal point to part II other than the shared idea that there is no consensus about Appalachia."

Still, this collection deserves a look, especially as many of our students read and discuss Vance's work for class assignments. For example, Robert Morgan (who teaches at Cornell and is a best-selling novelist and poet) is amongst the many contributors who are described in brief bios. This text strives to offer new perspective - like William H. Turner’s (Prairie View A & M) commentary on African American Appalachians – a group he says "Vance ignored." Other writers contend that Vance reinforced stereotypes and, like Lisa Pruitt (UC, Davis), note that while his is "a tale that affirms our nation’s core values and aspirations," it "does not foster understanding or empathy for those Vance left behind; rather it cultivates judgment." Also thought-provoking is "public historian" Elizabeth Catte's contribution exploring Hillbilly Elegy's use as an instructional text. APPALACHIAN RECKONING received a starred review from Kirkus.

The below essay was posted to Hillbilly Highways on 3/20/19. A post responding to the full book will follow.

Appalachian Reckoning is a collection of essays and creative material responding in one way or another to J.D. Vance’s bestselling Hillbilly Elegy. Lord knows Vance’s book needs response. This blog is, at least in part, a response to Hillbilly Elegy. But I did not go into Appalachian Reckoning with high hopes, and good Lord were my low hopes immediately dashed by the first essay—Hillbilly Elitism by T.R.C. Hutton.

Hutton violates Kant’s categorical imperative by using hillbillies as means, not ends.
That is one sin of which Vance is not guilty.

[Cover pic]
[Read more]

Hutton makes his single strongest point, I think, when he says that “the story [Vance] tells is not necessarily one exceptional to Appalachia but is probably familiar to any number of locales where poverty with a white face is rampant.” I myself am guilty of conflating hillbillies and white working class. They are distinct groups with significant overlap. There are issues to each not shared by the others as a group. And, of course, there are always been poor hillbillies by the pickup full. People only started to notice white working class issues when they spread beyond Appalachia.

He mentions structural issues. (Of course he does. “Structural issues” is practically a mantra in certain quarters.) They matter here. Appalachia has a distinct culture, but it is also a bifurcated one with a dividing line built of coal. And hillbillies have always suffered under absentee landowners, from timber barons to coal magnates to the federal government.

Hutton wants to criticize them. Fine. That’s good. Write your own book. But don’t pretend that hillbillies are people who can only have things done to them. We have agency. The downside of agency is admitting that we all play a part in our downfall.

Hutton criticizes Vance for not calling for policy changes. But, if Hutton were only to read the National Review articles he uses to tarnish Vance by association, he would see that Vance has policy ideas a plenty. But given the choice between taking concrete steps to improve our own lives and waiting on the federal government to fix things for us, I wouldn’t wait around for the latter. (Hutton may or may not have noticed that we have a bit of sclerosis in Washington these days.) More importantly, even if you accept that policy choices have played a role in creating cultural issues in Appalachia, simply fixing the policy will not fix the culture. Reversing policies does not reverse the consequences.

He also dismisses Vance’s proposal “that social services loosen regulations on foster parentage so that grandparents, aunts, and uncles can help endangered children” as “eccentric but fairly harmless.” It’s not that Vance didn’t call for policy changes, apparently, it’s that Hutton just doesn’t care about them. We are talking about the welfare of real families and children. But to Hutton hillbillies are means, not ends. What matters is how hillbillies serve his views, not the state ripping apart actual families.

Hutton is less concerned with Vance’s policy proposals, though, than with making one of his more tendentious arguments. Vance argues that hillbillies give an “outsize role” to the extended family. Other Americans also give an outsize role to the extended family. Ergo, “Vance [is] describing a problem as specific to his setting when it is arguably universal to the American experience.” It is universal in that everyone has an extended family, but different cultural groups give it different levels of importance. The fact that one cultural group shares some views and mores with another cultural group does not mean that those cultural groups do not exist as distinct groups.

I’m not sure that Hutton would accept that hillbillies have cultural issues and that white working class Americans have cultural issues. Which is, at this point, the leftwing equivalent of people who claim there are no issues with race in America. It is literally a thing that people say, and it flies in face of the evidence.

Hutton has a point when he notes that Appalachia and Yale Law School “exist in the same nation-state.” That is a true statement. But Hutton has his head very firmly in the sand if he doesn’t think there is anything to the assertion they embody “worlds that couldn’t be farther apart.” An embellishment, to be sure, but pointing that out doesn’t get you around the massive cultural and sociopolitical divide. Even if were true that hillbillies “are as likely to be rich as they are to be poor,” the same can hardly be said for Yalies.

Hutton’s notes that we have “reappropriated” the term hillbilly and “others like it” such as redneck and white trash. True, although the three remain distinct groupings (I will eventually get around to providing a taxonomy). Hutton, though, criticizes Vance for embracing the term hillbilly but not accepting it as a straitjacket according to Hutton’s terms, because Vance uses it to “distanc[e] himself from the Other.” Of course to Vance, hillbillies aren’t the Other. They’re just his people. His identity is as much a matter of his own choosing as it is shaped by his culture. Hutton would rob us of agency, but people have a terrible habit of exercising agency nonetheless. Hutton both accuses Vance of failing to hew to his own culture and of treating culture as deterministic. I’m confused as to how Hutton can walk away from an entire book encouraging cultural change thinking that (there is no support for Hutton’s contention that “Vance seems to think that only he, among hillbillies, is capable” of going to college).

Culture is a thing first imposed on us that we begin to shape as soon as we make choices that affect our own lives. We can choose to reject it entirely, but we can also choose to reject discrete aspects of it (as cultures themselves can, over time), or we can merely reposition ourselves relative to it.

I am myself participating in that reappropriation. I am sure Hutton could find plenty here to critique. But a hillbilly is what I am. I could choose to not be a hillbilly, but I do not. That does not mean that I have to, for example, accept the misogyny and xenophobia thick in hillbilly culture. But I choose to do so on hillbilly terms. My extended kinship networks cannot reasonably be expanded to cover everyone people insist to me are “us.” And my faith teaches me that all of the “them” remain God’s children. And they are no more “them” than the “them” that wrongly claim to be part of my “us.” Extended kinship networks are exactly that, networks. They are not race-based. This is not me “distancing [my]self from an Other,” it is exercising agency in my own life.

But, of course, Hutton’s essay “is aimed not at that underclass . . . , but rather at a middle- and upper-class readership more than happy to learn that” Hillbilly Elegy is badthink by a bad guy and an thus be safely ignored. They can continue to refuse to preach the bourgeois values that they practice—Vance preaching what he practices is a grievous sin in their eyes—while patting themselves on the back that they correctly know that “structural issues” are to blame for the deplorables, who they hate, but really they are derivatively hating elites because the poors lack the ability to fix their own lives, all while doing no more to fix those structural issues than reference the president in a few angry tweets (not that any of their policy prescriptions would actually help).

Hutton provides little argument. He relies heavily on a set of schema his elitist audience will walk in with. Hutton need merely mention names like Peter Thiel, Charles Murray, and Amy Chua. He doesn’t actually tell you why you ought think them awful, or even how association with them impugns Vance. How clear is it that Hutton is talking only to a very particular audience? He complains that Vance doesn’t define “American Dream”! Hutton is apparently unaware of a rich history of discourse on the American Dream [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVR_OL7etyI].

Hutton is also prone to wildly unsubstantiated claims like that Hillbilly Elegy is “a book about race, more so than region or class.” Hutton notes that Vance ask use to consider “how class and family affect the poor without filtering their views through a racial prism.” Asking people to not filter their views through a racial prism is taboo. Everything simply must be about race. Hillbilly has all sorts of racial connotations that Vance is held responsible for. What connotations? It depends on what part of the essay you’re reading. This, at least, tells us more about why Hutton thinks we should think Vance bad because he thinks we already think Murray and Chua bad. They, too, asked us to consider these issues without filtering our views through a racial prism in Coming Apart and The Triple Package. Murray’s book is filled with the sort of white cultural degradation we are told does not exist; Chua’s book is filled with multicultural “up-by-your-own-bootstraps fairy tale[s]” that we are told are prevented by structural issues.

(I’m also confused as to what the critics who say that black hillbillies are underrepresented wanted Vance to do—invent his own T-Bone [https://reason.com/blog/2019/02/01/remember-t-bone-cory-bookers-imaginary-d]?)

What is falls before what must be. Hutton criticizes Vance for “staunchly defend[ing] the up-by-your-own-bootstraps fairy tale.” The problem is that . . . Vance is telling a true story about his own life. A certain sort of Leftist will insist that the Horatio Alger story does not insist. It takes chutzpah to do it in response to an actual Horatio Alger story. But stories like Vance’s and stories like mine must not exist, so they do not. We have always been at war with Eastasia, so evidence to the contrary must be erased, even if it is a person’s lived experiences.

Hutton claims it “appears almost pointless to” work. It does indeed appear so to hillbillies. Vance is arguing that they are wrong. He is right, both economically and morally. The elite denigration of both work and a middle-class lifestyle is wrong and it hurts real people in real ways.

Hutton mentions David Hackett Fischer but clumsily attempts to lump him in with Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney’s “Celtic thesis.” (Hutton also makes sure to mention that they are “beloved by conservatives.”) But he avoids Fischer’s much stronger arguments. As anyone who has read Fischer’s Albion’s Seed could tell you, Appalachia is culturally distinct from the South’s plantation heartland. Only the former is “Celtic,” and that only nominally so—Fischer ably argues that rather than any distinct Celtic culture it was the culture of the Scots-English border region that settlers brought to Appalachia. Reading Albion’s Seed was reading a description of just how I was raised. Leaving the hills to go live in the lower South taught me the two cultures are distinct.

Vance has contributed several articles for National Review. This gives Hutton an excuse to go off on a merry tangent about Kevin Williamson. He doesn’t bother providing any connection between the views of the two beyond that they both write at National Review (a publication whose writers don’t even agree on Donald Trump). Hutton’s target is (of course) Williamson’s infamous article [https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/03/donald-trump-white-working-class-dysfunction-real-opportunity-needed-not-trump/] arguing that “dysfunctional, downscale communities . . . deserve to die.” This is what would seem a banal point. (Albeit one with which Vance himself surely disagrees.) I grew up near a high school named using the first letter of several local mining communities. None of those mining communities continue to exist in any significant form. The idea that sometimes communities die, that this is okay or even good, and that the people in them ought to move, rather than keep those communities on life support via subsidy, is in no way remarkable. Nor does it imply that the people in those communities should die. I appreciate a desire to stay. But if hillbillies always stayed, this blog wouldn’t be called Hillbilly Highways, and Vance, Williamson, and I wouldn’t be telling the same personal stories. But, to Hutton, the underlying motivation for Williamson’s article simply must be class-based animus. No mention is made of Williamson’s own hardscrabble upbringing in the panhandle of Texas. Or that he turned his infamously barbed pen toward an aristocrat who spoke favorably of the actual destruction of poor bodies and did so in class-based terms [https://www.nationalreview.com/2014/09/we-only-whisper-it-kevin-d-williamson/].

In season 2 of Justified, Margo Martindale’s hillbilly crime matriarch Mags Bennett declares “We got our own kind of food, our own music. Our own liquor! We got our own way of courting, and raising children! And our own way of living and dying.” Not so, to here Hutton tell it. He instead suggests hillbillies are bound “by a culture imposed upon them by market forces.” Of all the things that have, can, and will be taken from us, I expected and will stand for robbing us of agency over our own culture least of all. I don’t mind Hutton criticizing Hillbilly Elegy. I just wish he wouldn’t gladly sacrifice hillbillies to do so.

When Hillbilly Elegy came out, it landed like a thunderclap, perhaps because it was released during the 2016 election and was perceived as an explanation of the inexplicable popularity of Donald Trump. I put it on hold at the library, but before I read it, I listened to a few interviews with him on television and canceled my hold on the book. It was clear he was just one more advocate for abandoning the poor, only this pathologizing the white working class of Appalachia based solely on his own family experience. Nonetheless, the stereotypes in Vance’s book have proven popular and enduring, so I was very interested in reading Appalachian Reckoning, a collection of responses to the book, from academic rebuttals and personal essays to poetry and photography.

From the Protestant Work Ethic to the Prosperity Gospel, the god everyone worships is wealth and the greatest sin is poverty. America’s civic religion is Horation Algerism. This makes it very profitable to comfort the comfortable by telling them they need not feel compassion for those who struggle because it’s their own fault, their bad choices, their addiction to drugs, their failure to get a good job, and their cultural poverty. We hear it again with every generation and Vance hit a sweet spot just in time. We who are on the left and right can have smug contempt for Trump voters because they are uneducated, racist, lazy, hillbillies on opioids. According to R. C. Hutton points out “the book is aimed not at that underclass (few books are), but rather at a middle- and upper-class readership more than happy to learn that white American poverty has nothing to do with them or with any structural problems in American economy and society and everything to do with poor white folks’ inherent vices.” Yup.

Appalachian Reckoning restores the variety, vitality, and value of the people of Appalachia. The book includes several poems and photos and personal essays recounting the richness of that culture. The people of Appalachia are not culturally deficient. How much of our cultural heritage is sourced in those mountains? These are people who dared strike against the coal barons, whose Peabody coal strike is memorialized in song and film, and whose culture has fostered the Foxfire Magazine and book series (My parents had all the books.) Country music would not exist without its Appalachian origins.

I recommend reading Appalachian Reckoning in small bites rather than all at once because a collection of articles and essays critiquing one book naturally becomes a bit repetitive. How many ways can you say that Hillbilly Elegy works as a memoir, but as sociology, it fails? Nonetheless, I hope every person who read the original book would read this rebuttal because this book sees the humanity and complexity of a region and does not do the disservice of telling people whose jobs have been erased, whose land and rivers have been poisoned, and who are in despair that they problems they have are because they are weak, lazy, and ignorant.

Appalachian Reckoning will be released on March 1st. I received a copy of Appalachian Reckoning from the publisher through NetGalley.

Appalachian Reckoning at West Virginia University Press
Anthony Harkins faculty page
Meredith McCarroll Chronicle Vitae

Written in direct response to Hillbilly Elegy, this collection’s strength lies in the diversity of its selections. If this had been merely a series of scholarly essays condemning J.D. Vance’s much-discussed memoir, it could’ve been seen by some as a tired, progressive rant. Instead, it is a varied collection of essays, photographs, poetry, and personal accounts by Appalachian scholars, writers, poets and others who represent a variety of experiences across the Appalachian region. Eye-opening and enlightening, especially to readers who never considered the fact that there might be another side to the Appalachian narrative. Stories such as these need to be shared alongside that of Hillbilly Elegy, to avoid a continuing stereotypical view of Appalachia, and to show the diversity of experiences in the region. An outstanding collection of voices and viewpoints and a fascinating, enjoyable read. I received an advanced review copy from NetGalley in exchange for a fair review of this publication.

First, I had no idea this entire book was basically a rebuttal to Hillbilly Elegy. I was expecting it to be much more of a story or just general information about the region, but it was far from that.

In addition, I had no idea it was going to be such a deep dive into economics and politics. Of course I would love to learn about the economics of the region, but not in sentences that make my eyes glaze over.

I'd love to share a few of the short phrases that I encountered in just the PROLOGUE of the book:
"neoliberal capitalism"
"ethnic determinism"
"oppressive systems of extraction"

I'd also like to share some of the overwrought and overly ambitious sentences that I came across, again just in the PROLOGUE of the book:
"She argues that by understanding the positive role of the state in his own life trajectory, erasing the concept of white privilege, and presenting the idea of 'hillbilly' as strictly a cultural and not a racial identity and construction, Vance promotes the myth of a society based on true meritocracy so dear to white elites largely ignorant of the reality of systemic working-class inequity."
"The people and region belie simplistic definitions or characterizations of a monolithic and predeterminative 'hillbilly culture.'"
"Historian T.R. C. Hutton begins by critiquing the book as an unrealistic modern-day Horatio Alger tale of advancement over economic and familial obstacles through 'luck and pluck' that rejuvenates long-discredited 'culture of poverty' arguments to explain the hardships the region faces."

After I suffered through sentences that like in the prologue, mercifully, the book became actually unreadable. The Netgalley version started to have repeating sentence fragments in strange patterns. So I felt wholeheartedly more justified in throwing in the towel.

The book also claimed that Hillbilly Elegy was "largely devoid of analyses of broader socioeconomic and historical dynamics." I don't feel like that majority of readers of Hillbilly Elegy were looking for a research paper about the socioeconomic or historical dynamics. I feel like they were looking for a first-hand account of growing up in the Appalachia region and more information about the inner workings of the people that live there.

All in all, if you are in the mood to read an uber-liberal piece of work that uses buzzword terms to denounce often true generalizations about the region, then give this one a whirl. Do not read this if you are looking anything even remotely related to an interesting story about the region or its people.

This book is not for the casual reader. Recommend only if you have a keen interest in the Appalachian region history, people and current conditions in that area of the US.
It is written in response to another book that details someone's personal experience of living in Appalachia. I must admit I basically skimmed the book since it is so academically inclined and failed to hold my interest. I gave it 4stars since there was obviously a great deal of research involved.

This book would be a great source for study for course in political science, history or studies of the social sciences.

Thanks to the author,publisher & NetGalley for the ARC.
The opinions expressed are my own.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC ecopy for my Kindle.
This book is a response to “Hillbilly Elegy” by J. D. Vance.
Being born, raised. and currently living in Appalachia (southwestern WV and eastern KY), I was glad to see a more scholarly researched book. I did try to read "Hillbilly Elegy" but only skimmed chapters and pages because of such negativity that was written about the people of Appalachia.
Realizing that everyone has their own opinions, but until you truly "walk the walk" then only can you "talk the talk." I thought Anthony Harkins research included people to whom this applies.

I was disappointed in this book. I thought it was a story but it was a point by point of another book.

This book will appeal to a particular sort or group of readers - those that hold strong views and aren't hesitant to point out when they think someone else is wrong (and how). This also applies to those who like a lively discussion or debate, or those in book clubs, literature courses and the like. To those of us who can accept a beautiful novel in the spirit it was intended, despite errors, omissions, or slight adjustments to fact, we might not like this book. I found it argumentative and not to my taste; I believe every single person's (life) experience is heavily colored by our personal history and so what I think is not what you think. However, this book may likely do well with the publisher's intended audience.