A Slate reviewer delivered a scathing verdict on Vice President JD Vance’s new memoir, arguing the book accidentally revealed how much politics has “corrupted” its author.
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“Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith” is Vance’s first book since “Hillbilly Elegy” and was released Tuesday in what many read as a soft launch for a 2028 run. In a review published Thursday, Molly Olmstead wrote that the book is essentially two books crammed into one. For its first 177 pages, she wrote, it’s a “thoughtful” meditation on trauma, fatherhood, and Vance’s winding path from evangelical Christianity to atheism to Catholicism.
Then, Olmstead argued, it falls apart.
“From that point on, Communion, which came out on Tuesday,is a stiff and unimaginative political memoir. It deploys an eye-roll-worthy staff of straw men as it defends Trump’s policies,” she wrote.
The break comes right after Vance nods to his “evolution from Trump critic to Trump supporter” and pivots to defending the administration.
Olmstead traced the divide to timing, noting much of the thoughtful first half appears to predate Vance’s 2022 Senate run, with one passage lifted almost verbatim from a 2020 essay. She flagged a jarring later passage about Vance stockpiling ammunition over the “China virus” as the moment the tone sours. The book, she concluded, is a window into his devolution.
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“The tragedy of Vance’s new book is that this split reminds you of who he used to be. It’s not only that he squandered a decent beginning, but that he revealed how far he has fallen from the thoughtful young man who once had something original to say,” she wrote.
She found the ending unnerving, citing Vance’s wish to return America to a “Western Christian civilization” given he “just may be our future president.”
Olmstead’s critique comes after The Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swaim ripped the book for “egregious sloppiness,” and readers buried it in one-star Goodreads reviews within hours.
She concluded the book offers a “window into just how much the thoughtful boy in Hillbilly Elegy allowed himself to be corrupted by politics.”
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