I’ve been struggling with blogging, as demonstrated by the fact that I haven’t published a post since my February wrap up six weeks ago. I’m not in a reading slump, but I find myself with very little to say about what I’m reading.
 Glass House: The 1% Economy and Shattering of the All-American Town by Brian AlexanderRating: ★★★★Publication Date: February 14, 2017Genre: non-fictionPages: 336 ReRead?: NoIn 1947, Forbes magazine declared Lancaster, Ohio the epitome of the all-American town. Today it is damaged, discouraged, and fighting for its future. In Glass House, journalist Brian Alexander uses the story of one town to show how seeds sown 35 years ago have sprouted to give us Trumpism, inequality, and an eroding national cohesion.
The Anchor Hocking Glass Company, once the world’s largest maker of glass tableware, was the base on which Lancaster’s society was built. As Glass House unfolds, bankruptcy looms. With access to the company and its leaders, and Lancaster’s citizens, Alexander shows how financial engineering took hold in the 1980s, accelerated in the 21st Century, and wrecked the company. We follow CEO Sam Solomon as he tries to rescue the company from the New York private equity firm that hired him. Meanwhile, Alexander goes behind the scenes, entwined with the lives of residents as they wrestle with heroin, politics, high-interest lenders, low wage jobs, technology, and the new demands of American life: people like Brian Gossett, the fourth generation to work at Anchor Hocking; Joe Piccolo, first-time director of the annual music festival who discovers the town relies on him, and it, for salvation; Jason Roach, who police believed may have been Lancaster’s biggest drug dealer; and Eric Brown, a local football hero-turned-cop who comes to realize that he can never arrest Lancaster’s real problems.
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This was the first of three books that I’ve read in the last 6 weeks or so dealing with parts of the American economy that contribute or cause poverty and great distress. The premise of Glass House, written by Brian Alexander, is to show the toll that private equity has taken on the economy, by tracing the history of the Anchor-Hocking Glass Company in Lancaster, Ohio.
Anchor-Hocking was founded in 1935, and, at one time, represented the foundation of Lancaster’s economy. Multiple generations of family members – father, son, grandson – went into the factories out of high school, worked hard, raised families and retired with dignity. It was the 1980’s when things began to change for Lancaster – financial engineering, arbitrage, leveraged buyouts, and private economy began a 35 year period of stripping the company of everything of value to benefit shareholders and investors, leaving nothing but a husk of a company. And a town.
This book is deeply infuriating and I had to step away in rage and frustration several times, but it is also well worth reading.
 Poverty, By America by Matthew DesmondRating: ★★★★½Publication Date: March 21, 2023Genre: non-fictionPages: 304 ReRead?: NoThe Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a new and bracing argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it.
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2023: The Washington Post, Time, Esquire, Newsweek, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Elle, Salon, Lit Hub, Kirkus Reviews
The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?
In this landmark book, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Some lives are made small so that others may grow.
Elegantly written and fiercely argued, this compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem. It also helps us imagine solutions. Desmond builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty. He calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and, at last, true freedom.
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I read Evicted by Matthew Desmond back in 2020, and when I saw that the author had a new book coming out last month, I immediately put it on my hold list.
This book is quite different from Evicted. It is more ambitious and wide-ranging and looks at poverty in America through the lens, not of who suffers from poverty, but who benefits from it. Desmond states clearly, and unequivocally, that deep American poverty is a policy choice made by the people who benefit from low-wage workers and hungry children. It is searing and distressing. And, as well, it’s obvious, which is the thing about it that makes it so uncomfortable to read.
 The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters upon Your Shore by Jared Yates SextonRating: ★★★½Publication Date: August 15, 2017Genre: non-fictionPages: 302 ReRead?: NoOn June 14, 2016, Jared Yates Sexton reported from a Donald Trump rally in Greensboro, North Carolina. One of the first journalists to attend these rallies and give mainstream readers an idea of the raw anger that occurred there, Sexton found himself in the center of a maelstrom. Following a series of tweets that saw his observations viewed well over a million times, his reporting was soon featured in The Washington Post, NPR, Bloomberg, and Mother Jones, and he would go on to write two pieces for the New York Times. Sexton gained over eighteen thousand followers on Twitter in a matter of days, and received online harassments, campaigns to get him fired from his university professorship, and death threats that changed his life forever.
The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore is a firsthand account of the events that shaped the 2016 Presidential Election and the cultural forces that powered Donald Trump into the White House. Featuring in-the-field reports as well as deep analysis, Sexton’s book is not just the story of the most unexpected and divisive election in modern political history. It is also a sobering chronicle of our democracy’s political polarization—a result of our self-constructed, technologically-assisted echo chambers.
Like the works of Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer—books that have paved the way for important narratives that shape how we perceive not only the politics of our time but also our way of life—The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore is an instant, essential classic, an authoritative depiction of a country struggling to make sense of itself.
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The final piece of non-fiction that I read in March took me back to 2017, after Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton for the American Presidency. There is a lot of water under the bridge between this book and today, and I’m not entirely sure that going back to that time was at all helpful. It was depressing and remains deeply disappointing, and the events of J6 only enhance that sense. As a retrospective of the election, it was worth reading. But I’m not sure that I really needed that perspective in my life.
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These sound very interesting books, particularly the first one, which probably has worldwide implications.
Especially if the U.S. is exporting its exploitative financialization business practices. At a minimum, I think it would very much apply in England, which has engaged in much of the same “vulture capitalist” garbage within their economy.