BOOK REVIEW
Trump ‘tuned in to worker lament’
US president won votes of those who felt politicians no longer considered them, says product of rust belt who rose to Silicon Valley investment principal
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis JD Vance William Collins President Donald Trump’s inauguration speech has been called by many, most of them Democrats, the bleakest yet in the US. "A different reality exists … rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape … crime, drugs," Trump said, before the speech’s defining moment: "This American carnage stops right here and stops right now." Most liberals did not know what he was talking about. But JD Vance did; his book Hillbilly Elegy is all about the reality described by Trump, the reality in which Vance was raised and, through his extraordinary grandmother ("Mamaw") and personal grit, a reality he managed to leave. Hillbilly Elegy is first and foremost a personal memoir; the excited shout-outs on the book’s cover of it being "A great insight into Trump and Brexit" are a bit of a stretch. Vance — now a principal at a Silicon Valley investment firm cofounded by Peter Thiel, a member of Trump’s...
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