Hillbilly Elegy recounts J.D. Vance's powerful origin story....

From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate now serving as a U.S. Senator from Ohio and the Republican Vice Presidential candidate for the 2024 election, an incisive account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class.

THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

You will not read a more important book about America this year.--The Economist

A riveting book.--The Wall Street Journal

Essential reading.--David Brooks, New York Times

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis--that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.'s grandparents were dirt poor and in love, and moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history.

A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

Hillbilly Elegy recounts J.D. Vance's powerful origin story...

From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate now serving as a U.S. Senator from Ohio and the Republican Vice Presidential candidate for the 2024 election, an incisive account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class.

THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

You will not read a more important book about America this year.--The Economist

A riveting book.--The Wall Street Journal

Essential reading.--David Brooks, New York Times

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis--that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.'s grandparents were dirt poor and in love, and moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history.

A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

Hillbilly Elegy recounts J.D. Vance's powerful origin story...

From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate now serving as a U.S. Senator from Ohio and the Republican Vice Presidential candidate for the 2024 election, an incisive account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class.

THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

You will not read a more important book about America this year.--The Economist

A riveting book.--The Wall Street Journal

Essential reading.--David Brooks, New York Times

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis--that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.'s grandparents were dirt poor and in love, and moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history.

A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

In these dispatches, [Conover] invites readers to ride shotgun along an unraveling edge of the American West, where sepia-toned myths about making a fresh start collide with modern modes of alienation, volatility, and exile.... In a nation whose edges have come to define its center, this is essential reading.--Jessica Bruder, author of Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

In May 2017, Ted Conover went to Colorado to explore firsthand a rural way of life that is about living cheaply, on your own land--and keeping clear of the mainstream. The failed subdivisions of the enormous San Luis Valley make this possible. Five-acre lots on the high prairie can be had for five thousand dollars, sometimes less.

Conover volunteered for a local group trying to prevent homelessness during the bitter winters. He encountered an unexpected diversity: veterans with PTSD, families homeschooling, addicts young and old, gay people, people of color, lovers of guns and marijuana, people with social anxiety--most of them spurning charity and aiming, and sometimes failing, to be self-sufficient. And more than a few predicting they'll be the last ones standing when society collapses.

Conover bought his own five acres and immersed himself for parts of four years in the often contentious culture of the far margins. He found many who dislike the government but depend on its subsidies; who love their space but nevertheless find themselves in each other's business; who are generous but wary of thieves; who endure squalor but appreciate beauty. In their struggles to survive and get along, they tell us about an America riven by difference where the edges speak more and more loudly to the mainstream.

A work of real comic genius. . . . A wonderful, funny, warm, honest book, and, to use a much overused word, a classic. --Michael Korda, author of Country Matters

When Betty MacDonald married a Marine and moved to a small chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, she was largely unprepared for the rigors of life in the wild. With no running water, no electricity, a house in need of constant repair, and days that ran from four in the morning to nine at night, the MacDonalds had barely a moment to put their feet up and relax. And then came the children. Yet through every trial and pitfall--through chaos and catastrophe--this indomitable family somehow, mercifully, never lost its sense of humor.

A beloved literary treasure for more than half a century, Betty MacDonald's The Egg and I is a heartwarming and uproarious account of adventure and survival on an American frontier.

This second Foxfire volume includes topics such as ghost stories, spinning and weaving, wagon making, midwifing, corn shuckin', and more.

The seventh Foxfire volume explores the traditions of mountain religious heritage--including ministers, revivals, baptisms, gospel-singing, faith healing, camp meetings, snake handling--and more.

BESTSELLER #1 DEL NEW YORK TIMES

El libro en el que se basa la película de Netflix. Hillbilly, una elegía rural es un relato apasionado y apasionante de una clase social en decadencia: la clase trabajadora blanca en Estados Unidos.

El libro del año en EE.UU. que nos permite entender los cambios sociales que han conllevado la victoria de Donald Trump.

Los hillbillies, término peyorativo que hace referencia a los habitantes de la cordillera de los Apalaches, forman parte de este grupo social cada vez más empobrecido y radicalizado del país.

J. D. Vance cuenta la historia de unos habitantes que se han ido degradando lentamente durante más de cuarenta años y cuyo declive ejemplifica a la perfección su disfuncional familia. El resentimiento, la falta de ambición y una combinación letal de victimismo y pesimismo junto a una devoción por el país, una fervorosa fe en Dios y un desaforado sentido del honor han hecho que los hillbillies posean una tendencia a la violencia física y verbal, al alcoholismo y las drogas, se conformen con vivir de los subsidios del Gobierno y sean despreciados por sus compatriotas de ambas costas del país. Su respuesta a todo ello es conocida: encumbraron a Donald Trump a la presidencia de Estados Unidos.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

Hillbilly Elegy recounts J.D. Vance's powerful origin story...

From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate now serving as a U.S. Senator from Ohio and the Republican Vice Presidential candidate for the 2024 election, an incisive account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class.

THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

You will not read a more important book about America this year.--The Economist

A riveting book.--The Wall Street Journal

Essential reading.--David Brooks, New York Times

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis--that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.'s grandparents were dirt poor and in love, and moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history.

A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation onthe loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

We are frequently told rural America is in crisis. According to many journalists, academics, and politicians, our small towns have been hollowed out by lost jobs, and residents have turned to opioids and right-wing extremism to cope with their pain and resentment. In fact, many rural towns are thriving. Commentators have fixated on the steep decline of one region--Appalachia--and overlooked the millions of rural Americans who are succeeding in the heartland.

In The Overlooked Americans, public policy expert Elizabeth Currid-Halkett reveals that rural America has not been left behind the rest of the nation but instead is surprisingly successful. Drawing on deep research, including data and in-depth interviews, she traces how small towns are doing as well as, or better than, cities by many measures, including homeownership, income, and employment. She also shows how rural and urban Americans share core values, from opposing racism and upholding environmentalism to believing in democracy. Looking everywhere from Missouri to Minnesota to her hometown of Danville, Pennsylvania, Currid-Halkett ultimately reveals that the nation is less fractured by geography than many believe.

This is an urgent appeal for Americans to reconnect across a rural-urban divide that isn't so wide after all.

In this riveting account of an area of Appalachia known as the Quiet Zone where cell phones and WiFi are banned, journalist Stephen Kurczy explores the pervasive role of technology in our lives and the innate human need for quiet.

Captures the complex beauty of a disconnected way of life. --The Nation

With a new afterword to the paperback edition

Deep in the Appalachian Mountains lies the last truly quiet town in America. Green Bank, West Virginia, is a place at once futuristic and old-fashioned: It's home to the Green Bank Observatory, where astronomers search the depths of the universe using the latest technology, while schoolchildren go without WiFi or iPads. With a ban on all devices emanating radio frequencies that might interfere with the observatory's telescopes, Quiet Zone residents live a life free from constant digital connectivity. But a community that on the surface seems idyllic is a place of contradictions, where the provincial meets the seemingly supernatural and quiet can serve as a cover for something darker.

Stephen Kurczy embedded in Green Bank, making the residents of this small Appalachian village his neighbors. He shopped at the town's general store, attended church services, went target shooting with a seven-year-old, square-danced with the locals, sampled the local moonshine. In The Quiet Zone, he introduces us to an unforgettable cast of characters. There is a tech buster patrolling the area for illegal radio waves; electrosensitives who claim that WiFi is deadly; a sheriff's department with a string of unsolved murder cases dating back decades; a camp of neo-Nazis plotting their resurgence from a nearby mountain hollow. Amongst them all are the ordinary citizens seeking a simpler way of living. Kurczy asks: Is a less connected life desirable? Is it even possible?

The Quiet Zone is a remarkable work of investigative journalism--at once a stirring ode to place, a tautly wound tale of mystery, and a clarion call to reexamine the role technology plays in our lives.

The suburbs have become too liberal and diverse for many white American conservatives, so exurbia--areas outside the cities and their suburbs--are becoming the staging ground for the radical right extremist insurgency . . .

Beyond a fanatical devotion to former president Donald Trump, one of the curious things that united the rank and file of the January 6 insurrectionist mob was that many of them were residents of one of America's fastest growing residential areas: Exurbia.

Home to the likes of Georgia's Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ohio's Jim Jordan, big box retailers, chain restaurants, monster trucks, and megachurches, exurbia is becoming America's greatest political battleground, more important to American politics than urban or rural America.

In this brilliant work of political and cultural inquiry, veteran political journalist David Masciotra provides a definitive account of what exurbia is, how it came to be, and how it's transforming American life. Zooming in outside the greater metropolitan area of Chicago--where Masciotra grew up--he shows how exurbia has become a safe space to fly the MAGA flag and romanticize the mores of the pre-civil rights, pre-feminist, pre-gay rights 1950s.

But, as Masciotra also shows, reactionary white flight is not the whole story of small-town America. The story often lost is the power and persistence of small-town liberals--people who believe in equality, celebrate diversity, and enroll in movements for justice. Exurbia, as it turns out, is ground zero for the fight over a democracy mightily beleaguered, yet still full of promise, and still worth fighting for.

Combining interviews, research, and anecdote--and anchored in personal experience--Exurbia Now delivers a powerful ballad on the state of small-town America, and provides a sense of the fight for democracy, on the ground, in the heartland.

Half a century ago, deindustrialization gutted blue-collar jobs in the American Midwest. But today, these places are not ghost towns. People still call these communities home, even as they struggle with unemployment, poverty, and other social and economic crises. Why do people remain in declining areas through difficult circumstances? What do their choices tell us about rootedness in a time of flux?

Through the cases of the former steel manufacturing hub of southeast Chicago and a shuttered mining community in Iron County, Wisconsin, Amanda McMillan Lequieu traces the power and shifting meanings of the notion of home for people who live in troubled places. Building from on-the-ground observations of community life, archival research, and interviews with long-term residents, she shows how inhabitants of deindustrialized communities balance material constraints with deeply felt identities. McMillan Lequieu maps how the concept of home has been constructed and the ways it has been reshaped as these communities have changed. She considers how long-term residents navigate the tensions around belonging and making ends meet long after the departure of their community's founding industry.

Who We Are Is Where We Are links the past and the present, rural and urban, to shed new light on life in postindustrial communities. Beyond a story of Midwestern deindustrialization, this timely book provides broader insight into the capacious idea of home--how and where it is made, threatened, and renegotiated in a world fraught with change.

A reclamation of the narrative of rural and small towns and reservations across the United States, Discarded is an anthology holding the works of 63 artists with place-based relationships to 27 states. Informed by the front porch and the frontlines, this anthology explores the power of narrative-shaping in the face of erasure, blame, and discredit. Discarded has cooked up poems, essays, and songs that show a glimpse into who we are. We hope you'll join us to feast.

The Last Cowboys is Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter John Branch's epic tale of one American family struggling to hold on to the fading vestiges of the Old West. For generations, the Wrights of southern Utah have raised cattle and world-champion saddle-bronc riders--many call them the most successful rodeo family in history. Now they find themselves fighting to save their land and livelihood as the West is transformed by urbanization, battered by drought, and rearranged by public-land disputes. Could rodeo, of all things, be the answer? Written with great lyricism and filled with vivid scenes of heartache and broken bones, The Last Cowboys is a powerful testament to the grit and integrity that fuel the American Dream.

Climate change. Habitat loss. Soil erosion. Groundwater depletion. Toxins in our food. Inhumane treatment of farm animals. Increasing farm worker exploitation. Hunger and malnutrition in the midst of plenty. What will it take for farmers in the United States to embrace sustainable practices?

Michael Mayerfeld Bell's Farming for Us All first tackled this question twenty years ago, providing crucial insight into how the structure of US agriculture created this situation and exploring, by contrast, the practices of farmers who are working together to radically change how they think, learn, and grow. This updated edition of his now-classic work reflects on the lessons learned over the past two decades.

Constrained by an oppressive nexus of markets, regulations, subsidies, and technology, farmers find themselves undermining their own economic and social security as well as the security of the land. Bell turns to Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI), that state's largest sustainable-agriculture group. He traces how PFI creates an agriculture that engages others--farmers, researchers, officials, and consumers--in a common conversation about what agriculture could look like. Through dialogue, PFI members crossbreed knowledge, discovering pragmatic solutions to help crops grow in ways that sustain families, communities, societies, economies, and environments.

Farming for Us All makes the case that for sustainable farming to flourish, new social relations are as important to cultivate as new crops. This book is necessary--and hopeful--reading for anyone concerned about the present and future of food and farming.

Eulogizing the vanishing lifestyle of the family farm, Victor Hanson calls for America to take notice of its lost simplicity and purity before it is too late.

This suspenseful true story of a drug cartel hitman who got away with murder after murder in California's Central Valley over three decades reveals how the criminal justice system fails our most vulnerable immigrant communities.

On the surface, fifty-eight-year-old Jose Martinez didn't seem evil or even that remarkable--just a regular neighbor, good with cars and devoted to his family. But in between taking his children to Disneyland and visiting his mom, Martinez was also one of the most skilled professional killers police had ever seen.

He tracked one victim to one of the wealthiest corners of America, a horse ranch in Santa Barbara, and shot him dead in the morning sunlight, setting off a decades-long manhunt. He shot another man, a farmworker, right in front of his young wife as they drove to work in the fields. The widow would wait decades for justice. Those were murders for hire. Others he killed for vengeance.

How did Martinez manage to evade law enforcement for so long with little more than a slap on the wrist? Because he understood a dark truth about the criminal justice system: if you kill the right people--people who are poor, who aren't white, and who don't have anyone to speak up for them--you can get away with it.

Melding the pacing and suspense of a true crime thriller with the rigor of top-notch investigative journalism, The Devil's Harvest follows award-winning reporter Jessica Garrison's relentless search for the truth as she traces the life of this assassin, the cops who were always a few steps behind him, and the families of his many victims. Drawing upon decades of case files, interrogation transcripts, on-the-ground reporting, and Martinez's chilling handwritten journals, The Devil's Harvest uses a gripping and often shocking narrative to dig into one of the most important moral questions haunting our politically divided nation today: Why do some deaths--and some lives--matter more than others?

Meticulously researched and tightly woven, The Devil's Harvest is an important story because it tells us that if [this] can happen in one place, then it can happen in any place. And that's damn scary. --Michael Connelly, New York Times bestselling author of The Closers, The Lincoln Lawyer, and The Night Fire

In these dispatches, [Conover] invites readers to ride shotgun along an unraveling edge of the American West, where sepia-toned myths about making a fresh start collide with modern modes of alienation, volatility, and exile.... In a nation whose edges have come to define its center, this is essential reading.--Jessica Bruder, author of Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

In May 2017, Ted Conover went to Colorado to explore firsthand a rural way of life that is about living cheaply, on your own land--and keeping clear of the mainstream. The failed subdivisions of the enormous San Luis Valley make this possible. Five-acre lots on the high prairie can be had for five thousand dollars, sometimes less.

Conover volunteered for a local group trying to prevent homelessness during the bitter winters. He encountered an unexpected diversity: veterans with PTSD, families homeschooling, addicts young and old, gay people, people of color, lovers of guns and marijuana, people with social anxiety--most of them spurning charity and aiming, and sometimes failing, to be self-sufficient. And more than a few predicting they'll be the last ones standing when society collapses.

Conover bought his own five acres and immersed himself for parts of four years in the often contentious culture of the far margins. He found many who dislike the government but depend on its subsidies; who love their space but nevertheless find themselves in each other's business; who are generous but wary of thieves; who endure squalor but appreciate beauty. In their struggles to survive and get along, they tell us about an America riven by difference where the edges speak more and more loudly to the mainstream.