Charles Murray’s 2013 book Coming Apart: The State of White America lays out the statistics showing affluent whites typically have a strong work ethic, marriages that last, and religious observance (sometimes without belief), while poorer whites typically trash all three. If you want to know what that looks like at street level, read J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (Harper, 2016).

Vance grew up amid family chaos but joined the Marines and graduated from Ohio State and Yale Law School. He loves his extended family but can vividly describe its pattern of personal and financial irresponsibility. Mix clan loyalty, a willingness to fight, and a sense of being left behind and sprinkle with alcohol and drugs: voilà, a recipe for disaster.

Happily, a couple of family members and a couple of teachers inspired Vance to love learning. Working in a grocery store and seeing taxes from his small salary going to people who gamed the welfare system so as to buy liquor and steak turned him into a social critic who scolds both left and right for letting individuals off the hook. Vance’s bottom line: “Stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”

Vance turns 32 this summer, and I generally don’t have much patience with 32-year-olds writing memoirs, but his descriptions are so vivid that I’m glad he got the memories down before age sanded off the rough edges. WORLD readers should be aware that Vance when growing up heard lots of obscenity and profanity, sometimes from people who saved his life, like his grandma: He reports what he heard, so do not start on this book if raw words disturb you more than the cultural collapse about which Hillbilly Elegy will educate you.

An example of how bad the collapse is: Vance writes, “You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.” He adds: “Sometimes we’ll get a job, but it won’t last. We’ll get fired for tardiness, or for stealing merchandise and selling it on eBay. … We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness.”

Poor public schools have certainly contributed to the mess, yet one beleaguered teacher says: “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.” Vance writes that churches help, but self-reporting and behavior are different: His neighbors growing up would say they went to church a lot, “yet actual church attendance is much lower in the South” than in the Midwest.

And this great white hope also needs reformation: At a church young Vance attended, he “heard more about the gay lobby and the war on Christmas than about any particular character trait a Christian should aspire to have.” Accentuation of the negative pushed him to discard Christian faith, but he writes that he is now re-exploring it.

Bookmarks

Anthony Carter’s Black & Reformed (P&R, second edition 2016) successfully takes on hard questions of God’s sovereignty over the slave trade and other tragedies. Manisha Sinha’s 768-page The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale, 2016) is an excellent work of scholarship about blacks and whites, including many Christians, who risked their lives in a search for freedom.

In Prisoners of Hope: Lyndon B. Johnson, the Great Society, and the Limits of Liberalism (Basic, 2016), Randall Woods makes the best case for the War on Poverty that a scholar can make, but second-half chapter titles acknowledge what went wrong: “The Imp of the Perverse,” “Reform Under Siege,” “Urban Rioting,” “Abdication,” “American Dystopia.” No wonder some African-Americans see welfare as the new plantation. —M.O.