num_pages: 368
description: A Washington Post reporters intimate account of the fallout from the closing of a General Motors assembly plant in Janesville Wisconsin - Paul Ryans 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 stillsbut its 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 nations 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 Americas 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 its 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. Its an American story.
language: English
title: Janesville: An American Story
publisher: Simon & Schuster