11/28/2016
Journalist Alexander (America Unzipped) tells the story of how her hometown of Lancaster, Ohio—about which a 1947 Forbes cover story pronounced “this is America”—has been devastated by a barrage of economic forces. It was built on industry (initially shoe manufacturing, and then glassmaking), and factories employed much of Lancaster’s population for decades. Eventually one glass company, Anchor Hocking, emerged as the focal point, providing steady income and uniting the community. As noted by Alexander, “Residents believed their town was the way America was supposed to be.” But by the 1980s, business and financial changes hit both America and Anchor Hocking, including increased competition and corporate raiders. This forced the company and Lancaster residents into a downward spiral of low wages, fewer job opportunities, heroin abuse, and a general feeling of hopelessness. Through research and interviews with dozens of Lancaster residents, Alexander paints a picture of a town that’s typical of many formerly thriving communities across America. Change is tough, especially with today’s societal disconnection and the “financialization and digitalization of American life.” This is a particularly timely read for our tumultuous and divisive era. Agent: Michelle Tessler, Tessler Literary Agency. (Feb.)
Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town
Narrated by Bob Souer
Brian AlexanderUnabridged — 11 hours, 7 minutes
Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town
Narrated by Bob Souer
Brian AlexanderUnabridged — 11 hours, 7 minutes
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Overview
Editorial Reviews
"If you want to understand the despair that grips so much of this country, and the love of place that gives so many the strength to keep going, Glass House is a place to start."
—Christian Science Monitor
"There are some books that I think of as 'wake-up calls.' I’m talking about books that not only tell me something I don’t know, but that challenge and reconfigure a previously held belief, allowing me to see the world I live in with greater clarity and understanding...Glass House reveals that the Anchor Hocking Glass Co. of Lancaster, Ohio, wasn’t done in by the forces of globalization, but by private equity investors from Wall Street who drained the lifeblood from the company like a bunch of vampires, profiting mightily in the process."
—John Warner, Chicago Tribune
"Glass House is among the best of the books to hit shelves in the last several years exploring what’s happened to the nation and the role that greed and the collapse of once solid institutions played in the demise of small-town, middle-class America. Among the others are George Packer’s The Unwinding and J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy."
—Newsweek
"A masterful detailing of the brokenness of the venture-capital-rooted economy. This is my favorite out of all the books I read in 2017."
—This Appalachia Life
"A valuable contribution...Lays out a step-by-step account of Anchor Hocking’s slide, benefitting not only from Alexander’s strong reporting, but from candid interviews with key players. What is revealed is a complex system – Alexander argues it is deliberately complex - that allows savvy investors to make relatively small, highly leveraged bets on companies like Anchor Hocking."
—Forbes
"Gripping...There are those who argue that leveraged acquisitions and restructurings of the sort that Anchor Hocking has endured make companies more efficient and steer capital to better uses...Alexander makes a persuasive case, though, that from the perspective of Lancaster, it’s been one big fleecing."
—Bloomberg Businessweek
"For those still trying to fathom why the land of the free and the home of the brave opted for a crass, vituperative huckster with an unwavering fondness for alternative facts instead of the flawed oligarch Democrats served up, Brian Alexander has a story for you."
—The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"A field study looking at the declining fortunes of the industrial city of Lancaster, Ohio."
—The Toronto Star
"This well-reported book is all the stronger given the author’s connection to it: Lancaster is Alexander’s hometown. Shades of JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy."
—The New York Post
"It’s the book Hillbilly Elegy should have been. It’s unsettling and unforgiving, but so is its subject."
—Matt Reed, Inside Higher Ed
"An examination of a town in Ohio that quite literally fell apart. From drug dealers to cops, from industry to finance, Alexander goes deep into the heart of what ails us and takes no prisoners."
—Newsweek's "The Week in Reading"
"Alexander tells a riveting story."
—The Rotarian
"If you liked Hillbilly Elegy, this should be next on your list."
—The Oklahoman
"Provocative."
—The Columbus Dispatch
"Shows in fine-grained detail how the American dream of opportunity and fairness died in Lancaster and in similar towns all across the middle of the country...Glass House has the style and structure of a grand panoramic novel as Alexander follows a cast of characters located in every strata of Lancaster society."
—Sojourners
"Powerful."
—The Australian
" "Remarkable...paints a vivid picture of the downward spiral of the white working class."
—William Lazonick, Cornell University ILR Review
"Alexander sheds light on how white, working-class Americans came to lose faith in the institutions of our democracy and in the basic social contract."
—Ruth Conniff, The Progressive
"Alexander deftly shows how Lancaster represents the collapse of the American dream in microcosm. The other Ohio. The other America. No New Deal awaits them. Their predicament is not covered on the evening news. But they have Trump."
—Inequality.org
"A well documented examination of how this once flourishing Ohio town became something else altogether."
—Dayton Daily News
"A particularly timely read for our tumultuous and divisive era."
—Publishers Weekly
"A devastating and illuminating book that shows how a city and a country got where they are and how difficult it can be to reverse course."
—Kirkus Reviews (Starred review)
"[An] essential book to understand American reality and politics."
—The Washington Book Review
"Offers insights into how economic trends are tied to the financial and health problems plaguing many middle- and low-income Americans."
—CBS News
"Brian Alexander's moving new book Glass House explores how the undermining by venture capital of once-enviable factory jobs in Lancaster, Ohio, has nearly killed that once-thriving town. You could write the same book about half of the country."
—Chris Jones, The Chicago Tribune
"An extraordinary book."
—Vick Mickunas, Book Nook, WYSO, Miami Valley
"Emotionally striking...Alexander has combined his considerable journalistic talent with love for his broken hometown, producing an incredible, unshaking look at the true story of the American working class."
—Booklist
"[Alexander] moves the story along with the force of a novel, interweaving the saga of the business itself with the lives of four friends."
—Economic Principals
“Dramatizes vividly how a half-century of economic ‘progress’ dismantled America’s once-sturdy middle class... Alexander personalizes this familiar story in a compelling, often surprising, and utterly heartbreaking way.”
—Timothy Noah, author of The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It
"Glass House reads more like a great novel... a fascinating, multi-layered, and superbly written account of how politics, corporate greed, low wages, and the recent heroin epidemic have nearly destroyed a once prosperous Midwestern city. This is a must read for anyone interested in really understanding the anger and frustration of blue collar workers and the middle class in America today."
—Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Heavenly Table and The Devil All the Time
"Glass House is a compelling and harrowing look at the corrosion of the social and economic institutions that once held us all together, from the corporate boardroom to the factory floor. It's the most heartbreaking tale of a city since Mike Davis's City of Quartz."
—Victor Fleischer, Professor of Law, University of San Diego, and New York Times columnist
"A compassionate but clear-eyed description of how deindustrialization, financial speculation, union-busting and deregulation undermined the social fabric of Alexander's home town, illustrated with gripping personal stories."
—Stephanie Coontz, author of The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap
"An extraordinarily important book...Please, read Glass House. Read it especially if you read Hillbilly Elegy... a smart, sensible, approachable and eye-opening book that treats a complex topic with necessary sophistication while treating the real human beings at its center with the respect they deserve."
—Craig Calcaterra
10/15/2017
Lancaster, OH, recognized in 1947 by Forbes magazine as the quintessential all-American town, has suffered a tragic fall from grace. It was the company town for Anchor Hocking Glass Co., the world's largest maker of glass tableware, with most local families depending on Anchor Hocking for their livelihood. Financial engineering starting in the 1980s resulted in large salaries, payouts, and bonuses for the owners and managers and no money for maintenance of the factory's aging infrastructure. Efficiency and morale declined while imports from China, Mexico, and elsewhere undercut Anchor Hocking's sales. Layoffs and salary concessions resulted in underemployment and unemployment of once-proud glass workers. A native of Lancaster, Alexander was able to relate several personal stories and family histories, the telling of which offset the dryness of the financial detail. Unlike J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, a book about another town in decline, this one does not conclude on a hopeful note. Narrator Bob Souer reads the text appropriately in a solemn, strong voice. VERDICT Citizens interested in contemporary American life and those motivated to turning around towns such as Lancaster will appreciate the research here.—Ann Weber, Los Gatos, CA
★ 2016-11-23
A journalist examines how corporate America and the politics enabling it have corroded an Ohio city to its very foundation.Alexander (America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction, 2008, etc.) understands Lancaster, Ohio, as perhaps only a native can. He understands intuitively what the city long represented, the communal pride it sustained, and how the shattering of the social contract between industry and community has left it a crumbling shell. This isn't an inherently political book, but those mystified by the election of Donald Trump could well start here. Though specifically about one city, as the author notes, "whatever had happened to Lancaster had happened everywhere else, too." In 1947, amid the postwar boom, Forbes declared of Lancaster, "This is America," devoting most of its 30th anniversary issue to the city as "the epitome and apogee of the American free enterprise system." It was also one of the whitest and most homogenized cities in the country, one that owed much of its prosperity to the Anchor Hocking glass company, which employed many of its citizens and invested back into the community. As recently as 1990, Lancaster considered itself special, and Alexander remains glad and proud that he was raised there (in a family that worked in that glass industry). What happened? Plenty: big-box stores, competition from cheaper foreign goods, union busting and givebacks, bankruptcy and takeover by private equity outsiders with a "strip-and-sell" strategy, cheap Mexican labor, political corruption, flight of the well-to-do to cities that have yet to face such a collapse, and rampant drug dealing and addiction problems among those who remain. The author effectively interweaves the personal stories of those who have lived there and continued to with an analysis of Anchor Hocking and the policies that have made a few rich while reducing the many to hand-to-mouth subsistence or to prison on drug charges. A devastating and illuminating book that shows how a city and a country got where they are and how difficult it can be to reverse course.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940170184934 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HighBridge Company |
| Publication date: | 04/04/2017 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
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