GOVERNMENT DOES WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO; BUSINESS DOES WHAT IT IS:

Vance's ragged Middletown, Ohio, went for Trump two to one. And Franklin County, Idaho, where Westover grew up, gave Hillary Clinton just 7 percent of its vote. Trump got 10 times as much. The people we meet in both places are poor, white, undereducated, violent and evangelical in the extreme.

But as much as these folks were all-in for the oft-bankrupt developer, Trump's presidency has been a kick in the teeth for them. A con man in business turned out to be an even greater con man in office. The policies he has promoted -- taking health care from the poor, trying to slash aid for people unable to afford college, gutting regulations that save lives in mills and scrapyards -- have made life more hazardous in Trump-won ZIP codes.

Beyond that, the surprise takeaway from these books is that we have the tools at hand to ensure that demography is not destiny in Forgotten America. One common thread of both memoirs is distrust of institutions. And yet it was institutions -- the military in Vance's case, college in Westover's life -- that saved them.

That, and a handful of people who showed them enough love and an escape route from places where "family dysfunction" is too kind a euphemism.

Their cultures are toxic and intransigent. As Vance writes, "poverty is in the family tradition," as is "learned helplessness." In other words, the hillbillies of his book have no one but themselves to blame for being hillbillies. Many of his neighbors are painted as lazy dependents of opioids and government handouts. There's plenty of fighting, fornicating and fact-denying.

He is scornful of government help programs. "I am a conservative," he writes in a new afterword, "one who doubts that the 1960s approach to welfare has made it easier for our country's poor children to achieve their dreams."

But it was a government hand up -- the great meritocracy of the Marine Corps and federal aid to get through college -- that sent Vance on his way. To his credit, he has recently helped raise more than $150 million in venture capital to encourage new businesses in overlooked communities.

Tara Westover's story is more harrowing. It's not just the dark cave of ignorance in which she was raised. She says she was beaten senseless by her brother, in a family that enabled domestic abuse. Her father believed that doctors were "minions of Satan," and public school was a plot of the Illuminati.

College was her lifeline. Between battering from her brother and serious injuries at the old man's junkyard, she taught herself enough to get into Brigham Young University. There she first heard about the Holocaust and bipolar disorder, among many revelations.

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