The Long River Home: A Novel (Bottom Dog Press), Larry Smith
The river of Larry Smith’s new novel is the Ohio, and the fictional McCall family, whose history it traces from the Civil War, doesn’t move very far along the river. But the move across four generations of McCalls from rural southern Ohio to the industrial valley in the north crosses into radically different worlds while dragging the old ones along. The family saga begins with a “wild and conflicted” Andrew McCall, an orphan of the War. As Jeff Vande Zande describes it, Andrew “brings sons into the world who bring sons into the world who bring sons again, each as trapped by the McCall ancestry as he is buoyed by it.” Annabel Thomas places the novel “in the grand tradition of Wendell Berry and Conrad Richter,” Appalachian to its core, and “about people: their connections with one another, their home place, their struggles to survive and to prosper.” Larry Smith is director of The Firelands Writing Center at Bowling Green State University and of Bottom Dog Press, which has produced dozens of books of poetry, fiction and memoir about working-class life and experience. He is a native of Mingo Junction in the panhandle region of the Ohio River Valley, just down river from Steubenville, Ohio, and Weirton, West Virginia.
Embedded with Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home (Monthly Review Press), Steve Early
Steve Early recently retired after decades of work as a union organizer and field representative with the Communications Workers of America (CWA). Like Early, many union staffers are very good writers, but Early is nearly alone in regularly writing for general audiences. During his working years he wrote book reviews and thought pieces for magazines like The Nation and The Progressive — often on “sensitive” subjects about which other union staffers had plenty to say but would never do so in print. Now Early has started a second career as the most well-networked and best-informed reporter on the current troubled and troubling state of the American labor movement. This book collects some of the best of his earlier and more recent work. With mostly short pieces about a wide range of workers and unions, Early presents lots of inside information and insight in a way that is accessible to those of us on the outside who can only hope against hope that American unionism will succeed in revitalizing itself.
Class War? What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality (U. of Chicago), Benjamin Page & Lawrence Jacobs
For the past three decades, social scientists have been documenting the growing and now huge gap in economic inequality – which for a while benefited the top 20 percent at the expense of the bottom 60 percent, but which for the past decade has been benefiting mostly the top 1 to 3 percent at the expense of nearly everybody else. Supposedly, the vast majority of the American public either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about this growing gap in income, wealth, and life prospects. This slender volume reports on a large survey Professors Page and Jacobs did in 2007. Here’s what they found: “Most Americans are aware of high and increasing economic inequality. Most are unhappy about it. Most favor a wide range of concrete, pragmatic government programs [to correct it]. Most are willing to pay taxes to foot the bill.”
Monongahela Dusk: A Novel (Autumn House Press), John Hoerr
Born and raised in the steel town of McKeesport, Pennsylvania, John Hoerr was Business Week’s labor reporter during the worst wave of deindustrialization in the 1980s. He has chronicled both that experience (in the award-winning When the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry) and the more hopeful side of American unionism (in We Can’t Eat Prestige: The Women Who Organized Harvard). Set in 1930s and ‘40s McKeesport, Monongahela Dusk is Hoerr’s first novel, and it weaves a tale about the relationship of a traveling beer salesman and a blacklisted coal miner who discover a plot to kill a national union leader in Pittsburgh. The book jacket promises: “A violent showdown reveals the exploitative nature of the economic and political powers that would, forty years later, turn the mill towns of the Monongahela Valley into blighted relics of the industrial era.”
Manufacturing a Better Future for America (Alliance for American Manufacturing), edited by Richard McCormick
This collection of essays is a scholarly cri de coeur that an economy that can’t make things cannot prosper in the long run. Though some of the articles appear too specialized for many Working-Class Studies readers, the lead pieces on “The Plight of American Manufacturing” and “The Evolution of U.S. Trade Policy” provide cogent perspectives you won’t find in the established economic discourse as purveyed by the mainstream and business media. Likewise, the piece by John Russo and Sherry Linkon on “The Social Costs of Deindustrialization.” Used selectively, this volume could help create teachable moments in those numerous places that are trying to hang on to and build upon what is left of their manufacturing jobs and culture.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (Pantheon), Alain de Botton
An old-fashioned man of letters, Alain de Botton’s work includes philosophy and travel books, novels, a book on architecture, and even one titled How Proust Can Change Your Life. His new book promises “a journey around a deliberately eclectic range of occupations, from rocket science to biscuit manufacture, accountancy to art – in search of what makes jobs either fulfilling or soul-destroying.” According to one reviewer, de Botton suggests that work “has no greater value . . . than as a lifelong distraction from the fact of our inevitable demise. Having allowed us to put a roof over our heads, work is finally a way of keeping us ‘out of greater trouble’.”
Staley: The Fight for a New American Labor Movement (U. of Illinois), Steven Ashby & C.J. Hawking
In the mid-1990s the small town of Decatur, Illinois, became a war zone as three bitter strikes and lockouts overlapped each other for more than a year – the Autoworkers at Caterpillar, the Rubber Workers at Bridgestone/Firestone, and the Allied Industrial Workers at A.E. Staley. The longest, hardest fought, and most creative struggle was the one at Staley. Ashby and Hawking helped organize community, statewide and national support for the Staley strikers even before they were locked out in June 1993. They were part of every major solidarity action and many strategy meetings. And this narrative of the Staley workers’ fight to save their working conditions, their jobs, and their way of life is based on videotapes of every union meeting and interviews with 75 Staley workers and family members. Ashby and Hawking aim to “tell the workers’ story through their own voices,” as they address both “readers who are concerned about the deterioration of workers’ rights in American society but do not have extensive knowledge of unions” and “trade unionists looking for a how-to manual on standing up to management and winning justice in the workplace.” Labor historian Jeremy Brecher thinks they’ve succeeded in every respect, declaring Staley “One of the best accounts of a labor conflict ever written.”
Daily Bread: A Portrait of Homeless Men & Women in Lenawee County, Michigan (Bottom Dog Press), Jennifer Burd with photographs by Lad Strayer
In words and pictures, this books documents and evokes the homeless of Lenawee County, population about 100,000, in southeastern Michigan, bordering Ohio near Toledo. One reviewer says: “Lad Strayer’s images and Jennifer Burd’s poignant vignettes . . . . . [are] a reminder that those we shut out still do strive for a dignified existence.”
Lesbian and Gay Parenting: Securing Social and Educational Capital (Palgrave Macmillan), Yvette Taylor
Drawing on interviews and “showing the ways social class is central to queer families,” this book explores lesbians’ and gay men’s experiences of parenting, from initial routes to parenting, to location preferences, schooling choice, and community support.
Shadow of the Racketeer: Scandal in Organized Labor (U. of Illinois), David Witwer
In the 1930s the Chicago mob extracted payments from the largest Hollywood studios to ensure a pliant labor supply for the movie industry. This involved corruption on the part of both union leaders and company executives, but when crusading journalist Westbrook Pegler exposed this scandal, winning a Pulitzer Prize in the process, the focus was strictly on the union leaders. With access to behind-the-scenes documentation, David Witwer analyzes how Pegler and his publisher “shaped the news coverage . . . in ways that obscured the corrupt ties between employers and the mob while emphasizing the perceived menace of union leaders empowered by New Deal legislation that had legitimized organized labor.”
Reply to an Eviction Notice: Selected Poems (Bottom Dog Press), Robert Flanagan
A collection of Flanagan’s “finest and most insightful poems, the harvest of four decades,” Reply won the following praise from Colette Inez: “These intelligent, sharply focused poems recall a gritty past of rented apartments, ‘cracked tar,’ the fight game, and turf wars in scenes of working class urban America, 1950s. But this poet is also at ease with the natural world as he sinks his roots in the river beds of Ohio.”
Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times (New York University), Andrew Ross
A leading light in Cultural Studies, Ross turns his wide-ranging attention to “the new topography of the global workplace” and finds “precarious livelihoods” everywhere. Its publisher says of Nice Work: “Combining detailed case studies with lucid analysis and graphic prose, [Ross] looks at what the new landscape of contingent employment means for workers across national, class, and racial lines—from the emerging “creative class” of high-wage professionals to the multitudes of temporary, migrant, or low-wage workers.” Comparing policies and movements in the U.S., the UK, the EU and China, Ross pays special attention to “restorative alliances” between labor unions and environmentalists, and argues for a “more equitable kind of knowledge society . . . less skewed toward flexploitation . . . and more in tune with ideals and practices that are fair, just, and renewable.”
There Goes the Neighborhood: Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America (Vintage Books), William Julius Wilson and Richard P. Taub
In the grand tradition of University of Chicago sociological studies of city neighborhoods, this small volume summarizes for a general audience intensive studies of four neighborhoods chosen in the 1990s because they were “neither poor nor affluent” and “consisted mainly of the working and lower middle classes.” Along with Latino and African-American communities, one area studied is stably white and one is a “white neighborhood in transition.” Wilson supervised the studies done by his graduate students, chosen for their racial, ethnic and class backgrounds to suit the neighborhoods they studied. All four have been published as dissertations and two as books or parts of books. Wilson and Taub summarize each of the studies and compare “the extent to which the residents of each neighborhood shared modes of behavior and outlook . . . values, preferences, aspirations, and worldviews” and “how residents defined and handled collective problems, and to what extent they organized to maintain effective social control.”
Decent Work, Living Wages, and Government’s Hidden Leverage, edited by Robert Kuttner
The liberal policy journal The American Prospect combined with Demos, a New York-based research and advocacy organization, to produce this collection of essays by journalists and scholars on the wide variety of ways government could encourage, incent, and force employers to provide better work and wages. Authors include Ruth Milkman, David Moberg, Peter Dreier, Nancy Cleland, and Steve Fraser.