Having roots in Eastern Kentucky there are many stereotypes about the region that need to be shattered. The idea of the region as a homogenous Scots/Irish region, ignoring the contributions of Black, Native American and Hispanic citizens - is especially toxic in that it separates the issues surrounding the region from the issues surrounding many other places - issues of exploitation, of an extraction culture run amok, of environmental racism. The separation of people and attempts to pit low income people against one another is by design - a design that has been aided by extraction industries, eugenics movements, white supremacists and libertarian think tanks. A culture that was incapable of supporting itself would not require both armed and political strongmen to shut down popular ideas that had the potential to improve lives and give people back control of their land. Many know this yet it's not always put effectively into words.

Catte articulates these issues and brings the receipts. ( )

Overall, this book was a thorough disappointment.

The author explicitly states this book is a refutation and response to J.D. Vance's [b:Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis|27161156|Hillbilly Elegy A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis|J.D. Vance|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1463569814l/27161156._SY75_.jpg|47200486]. This is stated in her forward as well as repeatedly through the book.

When I picked up this book, I was excited. A book duel! I expected to see either 1) a recitation of points made by Vance followed by Catte's counterpoints or 2) Catte's own direct unique experiences offering a counter point to Vance's work.

Instead I got door number 3: incoherent ranting. Catte refutes exactly nothing that Vance puts forward in his book. In fact, Vance's book is a deeply personal memoir - how exactly would you go about refuting someone's life? Instead, Catte digs up a number of people who are conservative (as Vance openly is conservative) and attacks the views of those people.

All of those people have one overriding thing in common: None of them are the author of the book she claims to be refuting. She offers us a classic logical fallacy of the Straw Man: "creating the illusion of refuting or defeating an opponent's proposition through the covert replacement of it with a different proposition and the subsequent refutation of that false argument." (Per Wikipedia's definition of Straw Man.)

Her sources to refute the views of the people who didn't write the book in question? Huffington Post, New York Times, National Review, and similar publications. All valid publications, but since none purport to be any sort of experts on Appalachia they are utterly pointless in context of her stated goal of refuting [b:Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis|27161156|Hillbilly Elegy A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis|J.D. Vance|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1463569814l/27161156._SY75_.jpg|47200486].

I could summarize her position as this. J.D. Vance is a conservative, Elizabeth Catte dislikes conservative views, so J.D. Vance needs to be silenced. I'm personally sick of this faux approach to intellectual discourse.

I will say the second half of the book is much better. She leaves off her straw man attacks and presents a well-thought out history of the exploitation of coal mining, the unintended consequences of the War on Poverty for Appalachia, the current soul-deadening of commercial prisons as a growth industry in the region. I suspect the second half of the book was in progress, and she added the first half as an emotional overreaction to J.D. Vance.

I wish I had read the second half of the book only. I hope the author considers re-issuing a book with just the second half. The first half is a full on temper tantrum, poorly written and poorly edited, and should never have made it to publication.

I gave the book 2 stars - the average of 4 stars for the second half and 0 stars for the first half.





( )

On general principles, I dislike books purporting to tell me what I do or don't know, do or don't think. If you're such a strong psychic, tell me my grandmother's middle name. I actually don't think I learned much that I didn't already know. Catte's best points are reminding people that the things that they associate with Appalachia occur other places; that they didn't elect Trump all by themselves; and be skeptical of drive-by reporting. If you are looking for a book explaining the appeal of Trump in Appalachia (see below), this is not it. Catte is attempting to demonstrate that those are not the only Appalachians, not that she tells us much about anyone else. Instead she tells us who and what she doesn't likeJ.D. Vance and his book Hillbilly Elegy. Catte's great passion for her subject seems to imbalance her reportage.

I thought this was a rather confusing book. When most of the people I know, including me, speak of Appalachia, they are speaking of the Appalachian regions of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. (Maybe North Carolina). Call that Upper South Appalachia. Catte reminds us that the Appalachians, sometimes called the Alleghanies, stretch from Alabama to New York and continue into Canada. Call it Greater U.S. Appalachia. In that case, my father's family, and my maternal grandfather's family were Appalachians, although I don't think they ever thought of themselves as such. For that matter, is that the chief self identification of Upper South Appalachia? The thing is, whenever Catte is clear about the location she is discussing,, it's always in Upper South Appalachia! I was reminded, in a somewhat non-linear way, of Jim Webb's book Born Fighting, about the Scots-Irish-Americans. He starts off in Scotland, and then passes his subjects through ever finer sieves until it seems that the Webb family is the exemplar of all Scots-Irish-Americans. He mentions that some Scots-Irish, like my forebears, lived in the northern colonies and later states, and that's the last we hear of them, since the Webbs went south.

I am left to wonder about Catte's statistics. Did she gather these only from Upper South Appalachia, or from Greater Appalachia, and does it depend on what is most convenient? She frequently doesn't say. When she says that minorities are now the groups most likely to be moving to Appalachia, is that all of Greater Appalachia or Upper South Appalachia? My confidence is lowered when she explains that it means nothing that in 2016, McDowell County, gave Trump 4,614 votes to Hillary Clinton's 1,429. She argues that since there are 17,508 registered voters, only 27% supported Trump. That old game. It doesn't mean that 73% supported Clinton, had no opinion, didn't like Trump, or hated both candidates. A silly statement, but typical of the partisan people I know. I have noticed that whenever the Other Party wins less than 50% of the registered voters, it shows that they have scant public support. Of course, when My Party wins with less than 50% of the registered voters, they have a mandate from the people. I suspect her of playing fast and loose when she doesn't explain her statistics. (I suppose that she means McDowell County WV, although McDowell County NC is also in the Appalachia.)

I have to say that I mainly read rather than watching television or listening to the radio, so I judged J. D. Vance on his book. Perhaps I should reread it, but I didn't take Vance as generalizing about everyone in Appalachia, as opposed to his own subculture, as Catte does., I hope, probably in vain, that most adults understand that generalities should not be taken to apply in all cases. One of the most important rules in statistics is that what is true of a group is not necessarily true of all of it's members. When people refer to where I live as a Black county, I know that they are referring to the fact that 80% of the residents are African-American, not that the rest of us don't exist. After reading Webb's book, I amused myself with imaging them meeting my extremely different, but equally Scots-Irish grandfather. Unlike Catte, I don't think that the fact that he went to Yale (apparently a den of iniquity) and is a venture capitalist means that he is completely unreliable on this topic.. Her initial criticisms consist of cross-cutting her discussions of his work with other people's work, without much clarity as to how they relate, other than to suggest that Vance is in bad company. It is only when she gets to his discussions with Murray that she is on firmer ground, although I want to check that out for myself. She tells us "But I don't want Appalachia to be used as a siphon to suck attention away from LGBTQ identity politics and Black Lives Matter. I don't want to lose race in discussions of class." What is Catte's recounting of the exploitation of Appalachians over many years but a discussion of class? I get that she doesn't like Vance, but she really hasn't told us much about the book. it appears that the big problem with it is that they focus on different things.

The best, if somewhat jumbled, part of her book is the recounting of Upper South Appalachia's history of exploitation by outside interests. (But weren't most of those people the same as she berates Vance for discussing.) It's truly a terrible history. People lauding how it brought them into contact with the modern world reminds me the historian who argued that the European colonization of the Americas was all to the good because it brought them into contact with the rest of the world. I'm sure the remnant of aboriginal Americans who survived the onslaught were suitably grateful. ( )

A compact and powerful rebuttal to Hillbilly Elegy, a book which I uncomfortably recognise I was taken in by to a certain extent—I recognised some of the weaknesses of J.D. Vance's work, but not all of them, and I didn't know that he consorts with eugenicists. (Or, as I see after a quick search, one who coyly flirts with white nationalism. Gross.)

Unlike Vance, Elizabeth Catte isn't just of Appalachian descent but from Appalachia and a trained historian, and uses her knowledge of both the region and the past to neatly dismantle many of Vance's claims, and to show the flaws in many popular media appraisals of his work. However, there are points where Catte slips into a more academic style of prose, one which I know historians are trained into and which can alienate a non-academic audience, and that sits oddly alongside the more polemical portions of the book. ( )

Brief, but illuminating ( )