This book was recommended to me when I spent perhaps a bit too long complaining to a friend about the small factory city where I live and work. Granted, it's not the smallest place I've lived population-wise. My college town had around 25,000 people and Baytown, which exists along the eastern edges of Houston, boasts three times that. But the fact remains that I have spent most of my life in larger cities with a white, middle-class upbringing. Education, food, and love were never in question and for that I am grateful. 
 My city is situated right on the water and is home to a marvelously diverse population. It hosts a mostly thriving economy thanks to the oil companies that sit on our banks. On the flip side, infrastructure is terrible, flooding is common, and if something ever happened to the oil companies, everything would fall apart because so much rests on their shoulders. (Say what you will about the oil companies--I certainly might have once upon a time--but they also pay for a good chunk of our youth programming, so I cannot malign them. Everything has facets.) Families have lived here for generations and give no indication of ever leaving. Attitudes tend to fall along the lines of what JD Vance describes in his book, especially when compared to the factory city in Ohio where he grew up. I've only lived here for eighteen months, but I do work at the one and only public library in town (one of the best libraries in Houston and I'm not just saying that) so I get a close-up look at all of my city's inconsistencies. It is occasionally very frustrating and sometimes enlightening. 
 Hillbilly Elegy doesn't claim to be an in-depth look at the plight of the white working class or an expose on the secret lives of hill people. It is, however, a very compassionate look at one family as told by the grandson. JD was mostly raised by his Mawmaw and Pawpaw, his grandparents who filled in while his mother battled a multitude of addictions. His stories make up only a small part of everything he must have experienced, yet you feel as if you know the individual players by the end of the book. He's quick to praise the positive things he got from upbringing (a sense of loyalty to his kin), while he doesn't shy away from the things he's trying to change (a misguided sense of "honor" that would lead to violence if anyone offended his family). The strong writing and chronological storytelling also appealed to the teen lit nerd in me--JD's coming of age had a lot in common with the trajectory of many YA novels. 
 Near the end, JD raises the question of what can be done to help the working class, who are statistically more pessimistic and less financially stable than the other economic strata. He admits that things are more complicated than a single fix. There are cultural, economic, religious, and familial expectations and attitudes all swirling around. Not all of it is bad, but there are struggles here that could use improvement and they're aware of it and we're aware of it and what's to be done? A friend told him, "The best way to look at this might be to recognize that you probably can't fix these things. They'll always be around. But maybe you can put your thumb on the scale for people at the margins." 
 JD admits he had lots of thumbs on his scale--a grandma and grandpa who moved out of their hometown to pursue a career, a loving older sister who was his protector, positive male role models, an aunt and an uncle with a happy marriage to show him what he might have someday, Marine leaders to help him navigate post-Iraq life, Yale professors to teach him the value of social capital, and so forth. Here, as I wonder what I'm doing on the gulf coast of Texas, I'm also wondering about what I can do to tip the scales.