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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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JANESVILLE

Amy Goldstein

An American Story

"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.


Amy Goldstein has been a staff writer for thirty years at The Washington Post, where much of her work has focused on social policy. Among her awards, she shared the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. She has been a fellow at Harvard University at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Janesville: An American Story is her first book. She lives in Washington, DC.
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Book

Published 2017-04-18 by Simon & Schuster

Book

Published 2017-04-18 by Simon & Schuster

Comments

The 2008 financial crisis is frequently reduced to a matter of statistics and graphs, which makes Goldstein's extensive reporting so valuable and, at times, moving.... By emphasizing the effects of economic collapse on family life, Goldstein's narrative doubles as a sort of generational saga: It humanizes the worst economic crisis of contemporary times by chronicling the enormous pressures it placed on several generations of Janesville residents.

Anyone tempted to generalize about the American working class ought to meet the people in Janesville. The reporting behind this book is extraordinary and the story - a stark, heart-breaking reminder that political ideologies have real consequences - is told with rare sympathy and insight.

Goldstein gives the reader a gripping account of the GM layoff, the real loss it caused and the victims' heroic resilience in adapting to that loss. By the end of this moving book, I wanted her to write a sequel on what might have been done to prevent the damage in the first place.

Meticulously reported and researched... filled with startling - and disturbing - facts and figures.

Goldstein's exhaustive, evenhanded study of the plight of America's working class through the lens of one emblematic community is deeply humane and deeply disturbing, timely and essential.

Energetically reported and sympathetically narrated.... The story of ordinary people, how they cope or don't cope with a largely, though not entirely, unexpected economic disaster.

Janesville is haunting in part because it's a success story....One is awed by the dignity and levelheadedness of its protagonists, who seem to represent the best of America.... Goldstein is a talented storyteller, and we root for her characters as, moment by moment, they try their hardest.

Janesville is as relevant to the moment as a breaking news bulletin. It should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand how the Great Recession and deindustrialization have disrupted social, economic and political life in the American heartland. If you want to know why 2016 happened, read this book.

Based on three years of probing interviews, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Postjournalist Goldstein makes her literary debut with an engrossing investigation.... A simultaneously enlightening and disturbing look at working-class lives in America's heartland.

Reflecting on the state of the white working class, J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegyf ocuses on cultural decay and the individual, whereas Amy Goldstein's Janesville emphasizes economic collapse and the community. To understand how we have gotten to America's current malaise, both are essential reading.

Janesville has won the Financial Times and McKinsey Business book of 2017! - Amy Goldstein becomes first solo female winner for her gritty tale of a Wisconsin town. Read more...

Fair-minded and empathetic.... While it highlights many moments of resilience and acts of compassion, Amy Goldstein's Janesville: An American Storyalso has a tragic feel. It depicts the noble striving of men and women against overpowering forces - in this case, economic ones.

Amy Goldstein was in the right place at the right time to help us understand why we no longer 'just get along.' Having immersed herself in Paul Ryan's idyllic hometown after its GM plant closed forever, she illuminates disrupted lives, marriages, and childhoods as the manufacturing and strong unions that built our modern middle class fadefracturing the community and breeding the political polarization that helped give rise to Donald Trump.

Goldstein is a gifted storyteller, and Janesville is a raw, beautiful story, one that sheds needed light on a country searching for some pathway to the future.

We've been hearing a lot since the November election about the press missing The Story of a middle class losing ground, hope, and heart. But it turns out that Amy Goldstein, one of our finest reporters, was on it all along. Her vivid portrait of a quintessential American town in distress affirms Eudora Welty's claim that 'one place understood helps us understand all places better.'

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.

France: Editions Bourgois

Brilliant, probing, and disturbing. A gripping story of psychological defeat and resilience.

A superb feat of reportage, Janesville combines a heart-rending account of the implications of the closing on GM workers and their families with a sobering analysis of the response of the public and private sectors. The book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the economy of the Rust Belt - and its implications for America's once-proud middle class.

[Goldstein] shatters a lot of conventional wisdom.

Ms. Goldstein's book takes its place alongside those other essential tomes of the Trump era, J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis and Joan Williams' White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.

Goldstein provides a welcome addition to the conversation on the broken social contract. Janesville is a town like countless others, and this book offers a useful cautionary tale for public officials, sociologists, economists, and engaged citizens alike.