No, I will not elaborate and no, I have not read either books
Hillbilly Elegy was like the Bible for liberals. Throughout 2017/2018 it was the most cited, least read book in the world. This is the key to how the couch meme took off. Everybody understood Hillbilly Elegy was an authoritative source, but nobody did the reading. Nobody could deny it. There wasn't a single person who could check a citation and say "no, that's fake" without waiting until morning and taking a trip to the library to borrow a pristine hardcover edition which has never been opened once since it found its place on the shelf.
As a book that everybody talks about and nobody reads, it's exactly like Settlers.
I never even knew about it until a few people i know that live in Appalachia started mocking it and calling it bullshit. Instant write-off, straight into the bin.
I read it in 2017, and was like 'he's arguing that poor people are lazy and have no work ethic, even though his prime example for this is a guy with 5 kids who also owns his own house, which genuinely means he is better off than most people, even if he is dirt poor.'
It was such a confused book that wasn't very far away from a 'make your bed' manifesto and yet it was supposed to explain the 'Trump phenomena'.
