Regarding the book JD Vance wrote when he was a childless dog person [Unscripted column]

When deciding on a new book, if the jacket-flap teasers and back-cover blurbs don't completely sell it, there's no substitute for opening to the first page, reading a few paragraphs and seeing whether it grabs you.

When I picked up "Hillbilly Elegy" by JD Vance, those first few paragraphs turned into a few pages, which turned into the balance of the nine-page introduction and a quick, enthusiastic purchase.

Vance's hardscrabble, Midwestern Rust Belt origin story hooked me from the outset.

Given who Vance has become today, it's important to note here that I picked up "Hillbilly Elegy" in February, years after the New York Times bestselling memoir had commentators across the political spectrum thumbing their thesauri for superlatives, but several months before Donald Trump tapped Vance to be his vice presidential running mate.

In February, most people knew nothing of Vance, a junior senator from Ohio barely a year into his first real political job. When HarperCollins published "Hillbilly Elegy" in 2016, Vance was an actual nobody, just a guy with a good education who was gainfully employed, half of a childless married couple living in San Francisco with their two dogs. (Those with sensitive political noses will catch the whiff of irony there.)

On its own, the unlikely path that delivered Vance to his tidy little corner of connubial bliss warrants attention. Raised in poverty by a drug-addicted mother who entertained a rotating cast of not-quite father figures, Vance escaped diminishing prospects in the steel manufacturing hub of Middletown, Ohio, by joining the Marines. In the military, he learned to discipline his mind and would go on to put himself through Ohio State University and Yale Law School, where he met the woman who helped him process his childhood traumas and became his life partner. Its underdog story line aside, "Hillbilly Elegy" is a potent meditation on the transformative power of love and how imperfect people who persistently care for others account for more lasting change than powerful people who don't.

At the heart of Vance's life and book stand James and Bonnie Vance, his maternal "Pawpaw and Mawmaw," self-described hillbillies who left their Appalachian Kentucky holler in the 1940s to find work and a new life in Ohio.

Where their daughter failed at parenting JD, Mawmaw and Pawpaw Vance picked up the slack. The dish-throwing chaos of JD's mother was tempered by the dedicated attention of a gun-toting grandmother whose grit was as unquestionable as the tenderness of her heart, and by a grandfather who taught him to respect women and delighted in drilling JD on math problems at the kitchen table.

The most unmistakable feature of "Hillbilly Elegy" is Vance's gratitude — to his grandparents for their affection, to the older sister who was his ally and protector, and to a colorful cast of aunts, uncles and extended relations whose many idiosyncrasies added color and character to his upbringing.

"Whatever talents I have, I almost squandered," Vance writes, "until a handful of loving people rescued me. That is the real story of my life, and that is why I wrote this book."

I loved reading "Hillbilly Elegy," and the liberals in my life don't hesitate to give me hell for it. That's the problem with politics in a nutshell: It fosters bias in otherwise objective, intelligent humans.

My liberal friends see only the JD Vance of today, not the Vance who sat down to pen his memoirs a decade ago, who stood against Trump, not beside him. The tenor of the Vance who wrote "Hillbilly Elegy" more closely resembles that of late Republican Sen. John McCain, who took considerable flak from his party for his consensus-building attitudes.

Consider the following passage in which Vance tries to explain the disconnect between Barack Obama, who was president at the time of the book's writing, and the "white working class" with whom the conservative Vance identifies.

"Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities," Vance writes. "He is a good father, while many of us aren't. He wears suits to his job, while we wear overalls, if we're lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us we shouldn't be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it — not because we think she's wrong, but because we know she's right."

Vance casts a disapproving eye on the "industry of conspiracy-mongers and fringe lunatics" who questioned Obama's cultural and religious heritage, and who write about "all manner of lunacy" in politics.

Indeed, if the supporters of the 2024 iteration of Vance were to look closely at the Vance of 2016, they might not recognize him.

In "Hillbilly Elegy," Vance invests occasional energy into trying to decipher the plight of what today has become his core constituency, the people politicos typically refer to as America's white working class. He asserts that the cultural heritage of people labeled "hillbilly," "redneck" and "white trash" perpetuates fiscal and spiritual poverty, and that America's political and social service mechanisms do little to lift them up.

In so doing, Vance cherry-picks case studies and attempts to use targeted statistics to make the case for broader social trends — a point-scoring approach as bogus as it is ubiquitous in politics, business and everyday life in general.

People, of course, can't be reduced to statistical averages, but Vance's infrequent, ham-handed attempts at political theorizing can be forgiven, as they do not detract from the detailed account of his metamorphosis from scared little kid to self-sustaining adult.

If a common denominator exists in the body politic, it is that everyone, regardless of partisan loyalties, wants to see the people they care about survive and thrive. Vance's journey as described in "Hillbilly Elegy" gives credence to the notion that only love, not politics, can achieve that aim.

Read it for that reason alone.

Michael Long is the deputy editor of LNP | LancasterOnline's Government Watchdog team. "Unscripted" is a weekly entertainment column produced by a rotating team of writers.