Chad benesh's Books by Status
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It took me a long time to finish this.
I am a minor civil war buff. I couldn't get into this book. The pacing is slow.
The story is interesting, but the narrative prose gives the same information later quoted in a primary source.
Notably, I didn't give up on the book. It was worth reading and have a reminder about the history of white supremacy that continues today, the atrocities and the white washing, the post-war selling out of the poor south and the Lost Cause.
I started a review of this book, but it stalled out for a while. After the Washington Post opinion piece and Ta-Nehisi Coates's Atlantic essay, I feel like it's a good time to talk about it.
What worked for me: Vance has a good deal of self-awareness regarding the hillbilly aspect of his background. He offers details unflattering to him and his family, increasing his credibility in my eyes. He offers another perspective that is at times baffling to me (“As a child, I associated accomplishments in school with femininity”), but useful to know exists. As a teacher, I did appreciate Vance's insight into how difficult it is for kids to have success in school when their home lives are working against what the school is trying to do.
Vance became a conservative in part, I infer, from seeing social welfare being abused. While in the big scheme of things, a century's worth of misused food stamps is completely dwarfed by the amount of money illegally and immoral taken by wealthy financiers a decade ago in the lead-up to and aftermath of the financial crisis, I think the lesson is this: perception of fairness matters. When I used to work retail, at a time when people had physical food stamps (like currency), a person might come in and make several transactions buying 25 cent bags of Cheetos with the $1 food stamp bill. Any change under $1 was returned to the customer in regular coins, not food stamps. A few transactions like this, and the person would buy cigarettes. From me, the same clerk who sold all the Cheetos. Now rationally, a few bucks misused isn't making much of a different in the U.S. budget, but the observer of the person abusing the food stamp system is not reacting rationally, and I think advocates for the poor need to keep that in mind.
Eyebrow-raising things in the conservative world of this book: he alludes to future wife Usha behaving like an “Ayn Rand heroine” as if we're all familiar with what that is. He cites Bell Curve author Charles Murray (mentioned in Coates's essay, not in a positive way) as a source of wisdom. “Fox News...has always told the truth about Obama's citizenship status and religious views,” write Vance. (Rebuttal from Media Matters.)
As Coates described, it's all about race. And yet, Vance appears to embrace a “color blind” philosophy. He is definitely not woke, to use the parlance of our times. “[Obama] conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him,” says Vance. “Holy shit” reads my note on the highlight of this quote. This isn't just turning a blind eye to the effect of race, it's actively asserting, essentially, that racism is not a thing in modern America. His description of meeting his future wife, Usha, raised my eyebrow. Never in the book does it mention her race or ethnicity. (She's Indian-American.) His immediate obsession (“After a few weeks of flirtations and a single date, I told her that I was in love with her. It violated every rule of modern dating I'd learned as a young man, but I didn't care.”) with her combined with her non-white name creates a story in my mind of a naive white man falling hard for the “exotic” (“She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly” writes Vance) woman. Not sure how he knows her a year before finding out she's single.
“[Obama] feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color,” says Vance. Ta-Nehisi Coates begs to differ.
I first read this book 6 years ago, and then re-read it to find out what I missed the first time after hearing so many people citing it as a great work of science fiction. I don't get it. While it was entertaining enough to hear about the innovative and creative tactics for me make it to the end twice without rejecting it, I was annoyed the entire time.
First problem, a minor one, is the clunky and trite dialogue. Especially the dialogues at the beginnings of the chapter. They made my eyes roll. “Is that an order?”
Bigger problem: I don't care how precocious a six year old is. He's not going to act like the kids in this book. I was looking for ways to give the author the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps they're not human? Maybe their ages aren't being measured in earth years? No. Kids don't act like this. Not even if you put them in situations like in the book. I never bought it, and that doubt stayed with me through the whole book.
This is a story of three seemingly unconnected threads, but of course why are they in the same book if they have no connection? So you know that something will bring the threads together, but in order for this to be an awesome book, the connection between the threads would have to create a sum larger than its parts. And it doesn't.
The themes of reinventing oneself, while not inherently boring to me, weren't exactly engaging to me as presented here.
On the other hand, the writing is solid and well-crafted, so I made it to the end. Some of the descriptions are still with me, and the characters were plausible and served their purposes.
