THERE IS NOTHING FOR YOU HERE by Fiona Hill

I read most of this memoir over Thanksgiving weekend because it's overdue and I have another book, Yours Cruelly, Elvira, due tomorrow but I have a feeling I won't be able to renew it, and my library is holding a novel, The Perfect Nanny, until today (I can't pick up holds if I have an overdue library book).

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century is good — I give it three stars out of five. Interesting reading about her growing up in northeast England, pretty much the equivalent of America's flyover states, or as Chris Hedges likes to call it, "a sacrifice zone." Fascinating how far she's come from being a coal miner's daughter to being embedded in the deep state. Remarkable how many luck breaks she got growing up from educational opportunities to applying for grants to cover room and board.

A couple things turned me off. First, she uses the word populist as a pejorative and not once did she refer to Trump as a fascist wannabe. And, second, she strikes me as belonging to the corporate wing of the Democratic Party with its myth of meritocracy; if I was a betting man, I'd say she voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Makes sense: if you get a Ph.D. from Harvard, you're most likely going to embrace the Matrix. I kinda give her pass, though, given her quasi-poverty childhood.