Andy Lee

“A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor—which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him.”
― J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

“This was not just any murder trial. It had all the elements of a crime novel—a high-society killing, a former college football star accused of murdering one of Nashville’s most prominent citizens, and a multi-million- dollar business hanging in the balance. Depending on the outcome of the trial, one of two families would own Capitol Chevrolet Company. The other would lose it forever. The stakes couldn’t have been higher.”
― Martha Smith Tate, The Last Ride