By the time J.D. Vance got ready to apply for law school, he’d already survived an abusive and chaotic childhood, made it through Marine Corps boot camp and a deployment to Iraq, and galloped through a bachelor’s degree at Ohio State in less than two years. But as he looked over the application for Stanford law, he found himself stymied by a simple requirement — a signature from his dean. "I didn’t know the dean of my college at Ohio State," Vance writes in his best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. "I’m sure she is a lovely person, and the form was clearly little more than a formality. But I just couldn’t ask." He crumpled the form and finished his other applications, the ones that didn’t require help from a total stranger. And that’s why one of the most talked-about books of the year is written by a Yale law graduate instead of a Stanford alum.