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    Janesville: An American Story
    Janesville: An American Story
    Janesville: An American Story
    Audiobook10 hours

    Janesville: An American Story

    Written by Amy Goldstein

    Narrated by Joy Osmanski

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    * Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year * Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize​ * 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year * A New York Times Notable Book * A Washington Post Notable Book * An NPR Best Book of 2017 * A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2017 * An Economist Best Book of 2017 * A Business Insider Best Book of 2017 *

    “A gripping story of psychological defeat and resilience” (Bob Woodward, The Washington Post)—an intimate account of the fallout from the closing of a General Motors assembly plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, 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 main factory shuts down—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–winning reporter Amy Goldstein spent years immersed in Janesville, Wisconsin, where the nation’s oldest operating General Motors assembly plant shut down in the midst of the Great Recession. Now, with intelligence, sympathy, and insight into what connects and divides people in an era of economic upheaval, Goldstein shows the consequences of one of America’s biggest political issues. 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.

    “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” (Jennifer Senior, The New York Times).

    “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, heartbreaking reminder that political ideologies have real consequences—is told with rare sympathy and insight” (Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Soul of a New Machine).

    Editor's Note

    Groundbreaking award-winner…

    This winner of the Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year prize is a groundbreaking recipient in more ways than one. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Amy Goldstein is the first solo female author to win the award, and it’s the rare business book that puts community and policy issues at the forefront.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateApr 18, 2017
    ISBN9781508238881
    Author

    Amy Goldstein

    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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    Reviews for Janesville

    4/5

    140 ratings12 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Slightly hard to follow all the story lines on audio, especially in the first half of the book, but after that I was able to keep them all straight. I was surprised how big of a character Paul Ryan was in this book, but I gained a lot of insight in to his background through hearing the stories of the other Janesville residents. I found this to be a more well rounded and more well done version of Hillbilly Elegy.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      In December 2008, in Janesville, a Midwest town of about 65,000, GM closed a factory employing about 4,000. It was a devastating hit. Author Amy Goldstein tells us about that hit, largely by following the post-closing lives of a selection of Janesville’s residents, some who were well off pre-closing and who remained that way, some who struggled but came out OK, and some whose struggles ended badly. Goldstein writes of heroic teenagers, of 260 mile commutes, and of suicides. She also writes of a town-spirit that may have saved Janesville from collapse. (Today, years after “Janesville” was published, Janesville’s unemployment rate is lower than the U.S average. But, sad to say, it’s poverty rate is higher.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Thoroughly researched and well told, this story of Janesville after the closure of the GM plant holding up much of the town's middle class is interesting, but in its desire to be told in an objective, nonpartisan way, it stops short of really exploring the "why" behind this downfall. Definitely still worth the read for its look at labor in the midwest and the struggles of factory economy workers.
    • 4/5
      This is a well researched and extremely readable book about life in Janesville, Wisconsin, from 2008 through 2013, in the years following the closure of what had been the longest-running GM plant in the country. Literally generations of Janesville residents had made their livings from the plant and the many manufacturing companies that existed to supply parts to the cars built there. Interestingly, Janesville is also the hometown of Paul Ryan, Republican champion of governmental austerity and former Speaker of the House, a somewhat ironic fact given how solidly Democratic and pro-union the town has always been.In the wake of the plant closing, the town's economy and lifestyle were devastated. Amy Goldstein skillfully and compassionately details the rising and pervasive unemployment, the lowering of standards of living of previously solidly middle-class families, to near the poverty line. School systems begin struggling, with students often going hungry and short on basic supplies, parents working two jobs just to try to get half of the income their union jobs had paid or driving four hours each way--generally staying away from home from Monday through Friday--to take jobs in still running plants. Goldstein also chronicles the efforts of local agencies to provide help in the form of job training and pro-active economic boosterism that tried to bring new corporations to town. In the midst of this came the election of Scott Walker-an avowed enemy of unions and government subsidies alike--as the state's governor. Soon the teachers' union was under attack from above, as well.Goldstein's reporting method was, in addition to providing a comprehensive overview of events, to tell the town's story through the eyes of several families, people she clearly got to know well. In so doing, Goldstein was able to paint detailed portraits of the day to day lives and struggles of the people of Janesville during these extremely difficult years. She also chronicles, although not in great detail, the ways in which these events gradually created "two Janesvilles," as the interests of the still thriving upper class and the increasingly desperate middle and lower classes began to diverge more and more dramatically.At one point, soon after Walker's election, he visits town and attends a banquet where a leader of the town's business community asks him in a one-on-one conversation, "Any chance we'll ever get to be a completely red state and work on these unions and become right-to-work? What can we do to help you?"Walker's response is, "Oh, yeah. Well, we're going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill. The first step is, we're going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer."The business leader's response: "You're right on target."A sad aspect into all of this is Goldstein's reporting, and documenting, that job retraining, as hard as people worked at making it available and as hard as people worked to receive it, in the end did little to improve the lives and incomes of most of the people who took such training.This book does a lot to bring all of these issues--for those of us not living in areas like Janesville--into sharp, human-dimensioned focus. I suppose one of the drawbacks is that the viewpoint of many of her sources is somewhat self-selectiong. By that I mean that the blue collar families that moved into conservatism and eventually, perhaps, into Maga territory, were probably nowhere near as likely to agree to spend quality time with a reporter.I feel strongly, however, that this book is an extremely valuable resource for understanding the economic and cultural issues besetting so much of American society today.
    • 4/5
      An in-depth look at how the loss of the GM plant in Janesville WI in 2008 affected the workers, the community, and the citizens. Told largely through the eyes of several people involved, whether they lost their jobs, taught in the schools, or were involved in community agencies, businesses, and politics. An important read.
    • 5/5
      I found this book very informative about the Steel Belt of the Mideast region and the slow, choking decline of what seemed like inevitable events. I know that sounds harsh but it seems (based on my understanding of this story) that there were red flags before the town of Janesville went under. Not to mention the recommendation to diversify the job market decades before GM (and all those “good” jobs) just left...
    • 4/5
      In 2008, General Motors closed its production plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, laying off thousands of people. Goldstein chronicles the direct impact, and less dramatic reverberations, this has on the community - from laid-off workers trying to pay the bills to teachers trying to help students suddenly dealing with uncertainty and stress at home.The strength of this chronicle is the manageable but diverse group that Goldstein chooses to follow over the next five years. There is the bank president/community booster, the school social worker, several laid-off GMers who take different paths to forge a new life, the head of the local job resource center, and a few others. The group provides Goldstein a large canvas to trace various effects, but never becomes unwieldy. She also includes a few more meta themes in the book, particularly the widening political divide, and the election and recall effort of Governor Scott Walker is included, as are the fortunes of Janesville's native son, now-former Rep. Paul Ryan. But she always returns to the "regular" people and tells their stories with genuine care and empathy.Janesville reminded me in some ways of The Unwinding by George Packer, particulary in the emphasis on the decline of the middle class and widening political and economic divisions in America. Both are worth reading, but Janesville is probably more accessible. It's an important read, and certainly a worthwhile one.
    • 4/5
      A dispassionate chronicle of how the dislocations of the capitalist economy wreak suffering on working people, reminiscent of George Packer's "The Great Unwinding" the book interleaves the stories of about a dozen indivuals and families from different walks of life. Despite some awkward prose, I was compelled by the unfolding drama of these lives and came away with what feels like a revealing photograph taken by a skilled photographer.
    • 4/5
      Janesville is about the loss of GM car manufacturing jobs in this Wisconsin town and all the long term effects. Goldstein really does a good job of showing how General Motors let these people down and at the same time shows the rise of Scott Walker and super, labor busting conservatives. It was quite pleasant to have just finished it before Walker finally went down.
    • 5/5
      Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein has won many accolades, including 100 Notable Books in 2017 from the New York Times Book Review and the McKinsey Business Book of the Year. Goldstein presents the story of a town and its people coping with the closing of the GM factory and how the town and families worked to reinvent themselves. Janesville, WI was a tight-knit community with a successful history of factories beginning with cotton mills in the late 19th c, including Parker Pens and the GM auto assembly plant and the factories that supplied it.The book covers five years, beginning in 2008 with Paul Ryan, a Janesville native, receiving the phone call from GM informing him of their decision to close the Janesville plant. Goldstein portrays the impact on employees and their families: the cascading job losses, the ineffectual retraining programs, the engulfing poverty, the men who take employment at plants in other states and see their families a few hours a week, teenagers working to help keep food on the table while preparing for college. This is one of those non-fiction books that is engrossing while being informative, bringing readers into the struggles, successes, and failures of individual families. If you want to know about the people who have lost the American Dream, the impact of business and political decisions, and what programs 'work' and which have not delivered, then Janesville is for you.
    • 5/5
      Well worth the time. This is well written with short succinct chapters that focus on the results of the GM plant closing in Janesville, and follow several families within the community as they deal with the changes that this brings to this blue collar hometown of the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan. I found it fascinating, yet very sad.I would recommend this to people interested in the nitty-gritty lives of prior middle class families that are still struggling to regain their standard of living following the recent recession.
    • 5/5
      Fabulous non-fiction description of what happened when General Motors plant shut down in Janesville Wisc. to its inhabitants, both workers for GM and for downstream operations that depended on GM as well as Parker Pen. How the working and middle class can be reduced to poverty and what Scott Walker and Paul Ryan did to help or hurt (mostly the latter to the extent PR paid any attention at all). Named by WSJournal the "best business book of 2017" though it is not written as a business book.