Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir Of A Family And Culture In Crisis

What I learned from this book is that although we’ve all earned the title marine, our core values and ways doesn’t just end at the conclusion of boot camp, we have to bring it with us to the fleet and eventually use our military teachings back with us as citizens. We can contribute good into our communities because our customs and curtsies, respect, core values, adaptation abilities, leadership traits, etc., would be what sets us out to be different than the general population.

The Marine Corps Experience, pp. 12 – 31 The Corps today, pp 318 – 335

The author points out various examples of the Corps short-comings throughout history. With the Marine Corps already struggling to stay atop its game, it didn’t shed positive light on the situations. With that said, it’s hard to point out the flaws of the Corps without also showing its achievements and how we can overcome any obstacle we are faced with.

The author Wes, when first being forced into military school by his mother was very eager to go back home and tried everything he could to make it back home, over the course of a couple of years that idea started to change. “I was now a platoon sergeant, a cadet master sergeant, and the youngest senior noncommissioned officer in the entire corps. Three years ago I’d been one of the insubordinate kids first entering the gates of Valley Forge. In an ironic turn, I was now one of the ones in charge of them” (Moore 115). One can see the dramatic switch in the author’s motivation, he once upon a time had a mixture of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation due to where he used to live and his surroundings, now he’s eager to progress in the military with strictly intrinsic motivation, with the plus of the extrinsic motivation of making his mother happy, but he mostly did it for himself. The author at this point knows that there are no rewards in the military, no payment for training nothing but pride, and is functioning on nothing but making himself content with his achievements, he’s focusing on the human not the economic aspect (Pink 25). In the other Wes’s case, his motivation did shift a bit after his friend Levy had told him about the Job Corps. He was a bit speculate because he’d heard about it before, going to the Job Corps was purely intrinsic on his part; he wanted to get out of the dealing game. Though, he had high motivation while in the Job Corps it

In Wes Moore’s 2010 book “The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates,” two men with the same name, born blocks apart who are raised in an identical poverty and drug plagued neighborhood are examined. What author Wes Moore discovers in his conversations with inmate Wes Moore, is that their lives were remarkably similar growing up. Given their current situations in life, their paths to get there take shape through a series of interchangeable decisions and life events. One Wes through mentorship in decision-making ends up a Rhodes Scholar and decorated war veteran, while the other Wes minus the mentoring ends up in prison serving a life sentence. The age-old cry, “It takes a village,” resonates in Moore’s examination of his mirrored upbringing.

Author Harriette Pipes McDoo addresses how family values are influenced by racism in her book, Black Families. She expounds that the challenges faced by African American families have given them the ability to strengthen their core family values through overcoming racially fueled injustices (McDoo 69-71). Factors like racism, poverty, and the fight for equal rights are all factors which vary across the nation within each household affecting individual family value systems. Along with the challenges of adversity, each passing generation inside of American culture have emphasized less and less on multigenerational relationships with families moving and growing into new families to new locations. This rift in the familial structure stems from the evolution of the traditional family combined with the self-motivated desire to succeed

When examining Coming of Age in Mississippi we must call to mind the Politics of Difference – as readers learn about Moody, it is also important to note how her experience differs from Mama’s or even Linda Jean’s. It is the

The book Hillbilly Elegy, A Memoir of A Family And Culture In Crisis written by J.D Vance is not like anything I have ever seen or read about. Vance begins his book by introducing the most important people around him, his family. Mamaw, Papaw and his sister Lindsey were his biggest support system and in many cases, his safe haven. In Middletown, Ohio where Vance spent the majority of his childhood was described as a town that didn’t have much money nor opportunity. What I learned from Vance was that being a “hillbilly” wasn’t an attitude or simply one’s lifestyle they chose, it's a culture. What they saw, learned, heard and adapted to was generational and it was surrounded all around them. One positive aspect of the hillbilly culture was

People are born into families without decision. We cannot choose our family and sometimes that is a bad thing. In some situations, people have a bad home life growing up as a child. Until a person is old enough to make their own decisions they will have to do what their parents tell them. When a person becomes old enough to decide for themselves what their morals are they can begin to live freely. In Everyday Use, Barn Burning, and Those Winter Sundays, the authors Alice Walker, William Faulkner, and Robert Hayden all illustrate significant change in the characters Mama, Sarty, and the man at the end of the stories.

In her novel The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls discusses social problems that people deal with daily. One of the most basic issue we deal with every day is the kind of parents we want to be and the things we feel are the most important to teach our children. The lessons learned in childhood is eventually what shapes a person’s moral and values as they mature into an adult. Walls’ memoir enables us to see how Rex and Rosemary Walls choose to teach their children to see the positive side of their problems. The Walls teach their children that no matte the circumstances tosses at them, they can shoulder the burden. Rex and Rosemary Wells may not be considered good parent, and probably not even mediocre parents today, but their children turned into well-educated adults.

Moreover, the military school environment helps the author and protects him from joining the drug business. Moving from Baltimore and growing up in a much safer environment, like the military force, provides to the author a good life. On the contrary, Wes grow and stays in Baltimore his entire life which affected him a lot. “Johns Hopkins University was only five miles from where Mary grew up, but it might as well have been a world away” (Moore 17). Most of the people who are living in Baltimore did not see the importance of education or ignore it because of the other problems that are surrounding them like poverty which results in drugs and crimes.

At a different point in each of our lives, we understand the benefit of family and friend systems. Kids begin playing the sports their parents suggested; they wear the same style of clothing as their siblings, or continue their academics in hopes of pleasing their relatives. In the book The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates, the author Wes Moore examines his life in comparison to another boy raised in the same conditions with the same name in similar Baltimore neighborhoods. The author grew up to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated veteran, White House Fellow and business leader while the other Wes Moore became a convicted murderer and is now serving a life sentence in prison. While most ponder what the true cause for the difference in these two men’s life, I believe the primary reason was a lack of a strong family support system.

The book “Hillbilly Elegy”, written by J.D. Vance displays the theme of persistence, resilience, and grit. Vance writes this book from a first-person viewpoint, describing his life growing up in a low-class family. The title comes from Vance’s family growing up in a “hillbilly” lifestyle. The story starts with J.D. growing up in the Appalachian Valley, beginning his life in Jackson, Kentucky. Jackson, Kentucky is a very rural area where the culture of family’s focus is on loyalty, love for the country, and self-pride. We later learn that Vance moves in with his grandparents for a sense of stability and security.

Raymond Carver was born in 1938 and had an unstable childhood which led to his unstable adulthood. He followed his father to different cities looking for work, and the two of them worked together in a sawmill in Chester, California. Raymond’s parents were not positive role models in his childhood. In Carol Sklenicka’s Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life, Carver mentioned an occasion when his mother hit his father “between the eyes with a colander and knocked him out” in his essay “My Father’s Life,” (Sklenicka). Frequent events similar to this resulted in Carver never having the ability to experience what a family should look like, leading to Raymond himself acting in a similar way. William A. Rothenberg and Andrea M. Hussong of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Laurie Chassin of Arizona State University found “moderate levels of family conflict are perceived by adolescents at age 10, with moderate linear decreases in family conflict over time. Adolescents in families where a parent had a substance use diagnosis reported higher levels of conflict than their peers at age 10, and this difference remained stable over time” (Rothenberg et al.). Since Raymond was still young during these events, he grew up surrounded by these conflicts resulting in a normalization of them. Not long after starting this job he

My military service reshaped who I am. My training stripped away any sense of entitlement and I learned more about myself in four months than I’d ever known before. It not only gave me discipline and taught me to perform under pressure, but everything I did wasn’t just for me anymore. I was working hard for the marines next to me in my platoon. The time came when each of us hit a breaking point physically or mentally.