Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award Winner
"Moving and magnificently well-researched...Janesville joins a
growing family of books about the evisceration of the working class in
the United States. What sets it apart is the sophistication of its
storytelling and analysis." --The New York Times
A Washington Post reporter's intimate account of the fallout from the
closing of a General Motors' assembly plant in Janesville,
Wisconsin--Paul Ryan's hometown--and a larger story of the hollowing of
the American middle class.
This is the story of what happens to an industrial town in the American
heartland when its factory stills--but it's not the familiar tale. Most
observers record the immediate shock of vanished jobs, but few stay
around long enough to notice what happens next, when a community with a
can-do spirit tries to pick itself up.
Pulitzer Prize winner Amy Goldstein has spent years immersed in
Janesville, Wisconsin where the nation's oldest operating General Motors
plant shut down in the midst of the Great Recession, two days before
Christmas of 2008. Now, with intelligence, sympathy, and insight into
what connects and divides people in an era of economic upheaval, she
makes one of America's biggest political issues human. Her reporting
takes the reader deep into the lives of autoworkers, educators, bankers,
politicians, and job re-trainers to show why it's so hard in the
twenty-first century to recreate a healthy, prosperous working class.
For this is not just a Janesville story or a Midwestern story. It's an
American story.
