Contemporary Authors

• Janesville: An American Story Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2017

1. Janesville : an American story LCCN 2016056605 Type of material Book Personal name Goldstein, Amy, 1957- author. Main title Janesville : an American story / Amy Goldstein. Edition First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. Published/Produced New York : Simon & Schuster, 2017. ©2017 Description xiii, 351 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9781501102233 (hardback) CALL NUMBER HC108.J36 G65 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Wilson Center - https://www.wilsoncenter.org/person/amy-goldstein

  Amy Goldstein
  AFFILIATION
  Staff Writer, The Washington Post
  WILSON CENTER PROJECTS
  "Tumbling Downhill: How Long-Term Unemployment is Transforming Lives and Reshaping our National Identity."
  TERM
  Jan 28, 2013 — Apr 26, 2013
  Bio
  Amy Goldstein is a staff writer for the Washington Post, where she writes nationally about social policy issues. Her pieces focus on health care reform, Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, welfare, housing, and the strains placed on the social safety net by the recent recession. During more than two decades at the Post, she has covered the White House and other notable news events of recent times, from the Monica Lewinsky scandal to the Columbine shootings to the past four Supreme Court nominations.

  Amy was part of a team of Washington Post reporters awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for the newspaper’s coverage of 9/11 and the government’s response to the attacks. She was also a 2009 Pulitzer Prize finalist for national reporting for an investigative series she co-wrote on the medical treatment of immigrants detained by the federal government. Amy is a visiting research professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. She holds an AB in American Civilization from Brown University and was a 2005 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. She is returning to DC from a year as a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

  Project Summary
  The central question of Amy's work is: When jobs go away, what happens then? She is using an approach that marries narrative journalism with original quantitative research, illuminating the day-to-day consequences of vanished jobs on people and the place where they live. How has the recent economic crisis affected job retraining, access to health care, mental health, family relationships, growing up and coming of age, economic development, political alignment, and more?

  Previous Terms
  July 2012 - August 2012

• Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University - https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/people/amy-goldstein

  AmyGoldstein
  2011–2012
  Katherine Hampson Bessell Fellow
  Washington Post
  Journalism
  Slipping Downhill: How Changes in the US Economy Are Transforming Lives and Reshaping our National Identity
  Amy Goldstein is a staff writer for the Washington Post, where she writes about national social policy issues. Her pieces focus on health care reform, housing, Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, welfare, and the strains put on the social safety net by the recent recession. During two decades at the Post, she has covered the White House and many notable news events of recent times.

  At the Radcliffe Institute, Goldstein will explore ways in which high levels of unemployment and underemployment, a defining quality of the United States in the early 21st century, are transforming Americans’ lives and reshaping our national identity. Weaving together quantitative data with narrative reporting and writing, she will examine both the private sphere—providing a ground-level view of the impact on people all along the socioeconomic ladder—and the public realm. How, she will ask, has the recent economic crisis altered family relationships, job retraining, mental health, political alignment, state fiscal policies, and more?

  Goldstein was part of a team of Washington Post reporters awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for the newspaper’s coverage of 9/11 and the government’s response to the attacks. She was also a 2009 Pulitzer Prize finalist for national reporting for an investigative series she cowrote on the medical treatment of immigrants detained by the federal government. Goldstein is a visiting research professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. She holds an AB in American civilization from Brown University and was a 2005 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

  This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

• Simon & Schuster - http://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Amy-Goldstein/483773389

  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.

• Amy Goldstein Home Page - http://www.amygoldsteinwriter.com/the-author/

  During her three decades as a staff writer at The Washington Post, Amy Goldstein’s journalism has taken her from homeless shelters to Air Force One. She relishes a good breaking news story as much as an in-depth investigation. She is especially drawn to stories that lie at the intersection of politics and public policy and explore the effects of both on ordinary people. Janesville, An American Story, her first book, reflects that.

  Amy currently is The Post’s national health-care policy writer, the newspaper’s main reporter covering the Affordable Care Act and Republican efforts to dismantle it. She has written about an array of other social policy issues: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, welfare, housing, and the strains placed on the social safety net. During the presidency of George W. Bush, she was a White House reporter, with an emphasis on domestic policy. She has covered many notable news events, from the Monica Lewinsky scandal to the past six Supreme Court nominations. Amy was part of a team of Washington Post reporters awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for the newspaper’s coverage of 9-11 and the government’s response to the attacks. She was a 2009 Pulitzer Prize finalist for national reporting for an investigative series she co-wrote with Post colleague Dana Priest on the medical treatment of immigrants detained by the federal government.

  Before joining The Post in 1987, Amy worked at the Baltimore Sun and the Ledger-Star and Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Virginia.

  Amy grew up in Rochester, New York. She holds an AB in American Civilization, magna cum laude, from Brown University. At Harvard University, she was a Nieman fellow in 2004-05 and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2011-12. She also has been a visiting scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty, a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a visiting journalist at the American Institutes for Research, and a fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

  She lives in Washington, DC.

QUOTED: "Following three families, teachers, politicians, business leaders and others, Goldstein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalist, offers us a poignant, fugue-like account of the gradual absorption of this shock."
"Goldstein gives the reader a gripping account of the GM layoff, the real loss it caused and the victims' heroic resilience in adapting to that loss. By the end of this moving book, I wanted her to write a sequel on what might have been done to prevent the damage in the first place. For it turns out that while we're often primed to take management's word for what a company needs to do, this is a question well worth asking."

Book World: Ruin and resilience in a factory town
Arlie Hochschild
The Washington Post. (Apr. 20, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
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Byline: Arlie Hochschild

Janesville: An American Story

By Amy Goldstein

Simon & Schuster. 351 pp. $27

---

In 2008 the General Motors plant in Janesville, Wis., the oldest plant of the nation's largest automaker - the grand "cathedral of industry," as Amy Goldstein calls it - abruptly laid off thousands of workers, and in 2015, it permanently closed. Poignantly, workers cheered and hugged and wept as the last Tahoe snaked down the assembly line. The company and union issued $20 raffle tickets granting the winner ownership of the gas-guzzling $57,745 SUV with a nine-speaker audio system and heated seats. And so it was that a factory that began making cars and offering a whole way of life in 1923 shut its doors for good.

After GM shed workers, other plants around town did, too. Many townspeople became GM refugees, Lear refugees, Parker Pen refugees. One out of three Janesville residents lost a job or had someone in their family who did. Following three families, teachers, politicians, business leaders and others, Goldstein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalist, offers us a poignant, fugue-like account of the gradual absorption of this shock. For example, she gives us Jerad Whiteaker, a 39-year-old father of three who had put in 13 years at GM, at $28 an hour, accepted a modest buyout - $4,000 and six months of health insurance - and tries to train for a job climbing utility poles. But once five feet up the pole, Jerad's knee gives out and he slides back down, scraping his chest on the wood all the way down. What if he got badly injured, he muses, or what if, at the end of his training, a real job wasn't there? Jerad quits and tries the night shift at a paint shop; then a job working 12-hour shifts for $12.48 an hour in a plastics factory; then a position as a guard at the county jail, where he begins to suffer claustrophobia and panic attacks. Still coping with periodic bouts of anxiety, he drives a truck 200 miles a day and ends up a forklift driver south of Madison.

In households in which someone was laid off, Goldstein tells us, half "had trouble paying for food.""For sale" signs went up on front lawns. Payday loan offices opened. Students arrived at school hungry and tired. Of workers hired into new jobs, more than half took a cut in pay. For many, an hourly wage around $28 dropped to near $16. To avoid such a loss, one father commuted a long distance to a higher-paid job, returning home only on the weekends. Three-quarters of those surveyed in 2013 reported loss of sleep, 71 percent a sense of restlessness or unease, and half a quickness to anger. Two-thirds told of "strains in family relations" and more than half a "loss of contact with close friends." Ominously, the rate of suicide rose. And to completely break our hearts, Goldstein reports that a majority said they felt "ashamed to be out of work."

At the same time, victims were exhorted to buck up, to reinvent themselves and, as the Janesville Gazette urged, become "ambassadors of optimism." And they did. As Goldstein writes, with "the federal government and the state, industry and labor - unable to lift back up its once prosperous middle class, Janesville has been left to rely to a considerable extent on its own resources. Fortunately, those resources include more generosity and ingenuity - and less bitterness - than in many communities that have been economically injured." And this fit the mantra of Paul Ryan, current speaker of the House and fifth-generation Janesville boy: to rely not on big government but on the "generosity and resources within [our] own communities."

Curiously, much of this generosity and resources, Goldstein informs us, was directed at GM itself. Long ago the first state in the nation to offer workman's compensation and unemployment benefits and to recognize unions for state employees, Wisconsin now went on bended knee to offer GM a great sum of money to stay in Janesville. Pooling public dollars from the financially strapped city, county and state governments, the state offered GM the largest "incentive package" in Wisconsin history - $195 million. But Michigan rivaled that offer with a still larger sum - $1 billion - and won. All this money was added to the $25 billion federal bailout offered to GM and other auto manufacturers in 2008 to save the industry. So while the unemployed of Janesville relied on local ingenuity and resources, GM did not.

Goldstein gives the reader a gripping account of the GM layoff, the real loss it caused and the victims' heroic resilience in adapting to that loss. By the end of this moving book, I wanted her to write a sequel on what might have been done to prevent the damage in the first place. For it turns out that while we're often primed to take management's word for what a company needs to do, this is a question well worth asking.

GM management talked of its layoffs as "structural" - a term carrying the aura of financial profitability, necessity, inevitability. But were the layoffs profitable in the long run, necessary or inevitable? In a startling 2014 review of studies published between 1983 and 2000, Harvard Business School management professor Sandra Sucher and her co-authors reported that there is "no clear academic consensus that conducting layoffs improves companies' long-term financial health." Paradoxically, efforts to cut costs can also increase them. Layoffs inject fear throughout the company, lower morale among survivors and decrease creativity. High performers are often the first to leave voluntarily, taking their know-how with them, sometimes to rival companies. Survivors become anxious, risk-averse, make more mistakes. Contacts with customers are torn. Quality declines. Absenteeism rises. Some workers engage in "retaliatory behavior." A survey by Watson Wyatt in the late 1990s found that only 46 percent of firms that downsized actually cut expenses and only 32 percent increased profits.

There are signs that GM was a prime example of Sucher's point. After decades of closing factories and laying off workers and moving production overseas, in 2009 GM faced a $172.8 billion debt. And these days, GM is "re-shoring" - bringing production back to American shores.

Even if GM had to lay off Janesville workers, we can ask, did it have to do it in the manner in which it did? Faced with the need to cut costs, other companies chose ways that were easier on workers. Instead of layoffs, Honeywell opted for furloughs - time and wage, but not job, cuts - and while other companies endured rocky times, Honeywell's profits rose between 2009 and 2012. Unlike GM, Honeywell froze top management salaries in the face of the 2008 recession and eliminated top management bonuses, offering the message that managers and workers were confronting the hard times together. Nokia, the Finnish smartphone manufacturer did something else. Like GM, it laid off workers, but unlike GM, it offered workers grants and training to help find a new job and if necessary develop a new skill, and even provided funds and expert advice to help laid-off workers start their own businesses. In Singapore, the government subsidizes employers who retain older workers otherwise at risk of losing their jobs. Big picture, GM made a series of bad turns - including its focus on high-end gas-guzzlers with heated seats - took Michigan's billion-dollar bid, skipped town and escaped blame which, in her sequel, Goldstein might make into a fascinating story all its own.

The subtitle of this important and rarely told tale reads: "an American story." And so it is: Between 2004 and 2009, more than 7 million workers were hurt in 40,000 mass layoffs. In the end, Goldstein says, "it became evident that no one outside - not the Democrats nor the Republicans, not the bureaucrats in Madison or in Washington, not the fading unions nor the struggling corporations - had the key to create the middle class anew." Maybe so. But does such a disproportionate burden have to rest on the weary shoulders of the Jerad Whiteakers of the nation? How welcome it would be if the higher-ups at GM and elsewhere demonstrated the same generosity and ingenuity that Jerad and his co-workers have displayed.

---

Hochschild is the author, most recently, of "Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right."

QUOTED: "You will learn a lot about the arbitrary rules and idiosyncrasies of our government programs from this book."
"Janesville is not without shortcomings. It can be overwhelming at first, with many characters raining down on the reader at once—it's a bit like getting caught in a hailstorm of pickup sticks. (Though there's a cheat sheet in the front of the book, which helps.) There's almost no discussion of globalization and outsourcing jobs to Mexico, which seems a strange omission. Surely, the residents of Janesville must have an opinion about this? But these are minor objections, ultimately. Janesville is eye-opening, important, a diligent work of reportage."

When the G.M. Plant Closed, Havoc Followed
Jennifer Senior
The New York Times. (Apr. 20, 2017): Arts and Entertainment: pC6(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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JANESVILLEAn American StoryBy Amy Goldstein351 pages. Simon & Schuster. $27.

Over the course of his career, Paul D. Ryan, the House speaker, has been described as a policy nerd, a lightweight, a canny tactician, a dreadful tactician, a man of principle and a man whose vertebrae have mysteriously gone missing.

But in the opening pages of ''Janesville: An American Story,'' Amy Goldstein's moving and magnificently well-researched ethnography of a small Wisconsin factory city on economic life support, Ryan is just another congressman, pleading on behalf of his hometown, population 63,000.

It's 2008, and Ryan has just received a phone call from Rick Wagoner, then the chairman and chief executive of General Motors, to alert him that the company will shortly be stopping all production in Janesville.

The news is too improbable to register. Janesville has a storied place in labor history, changing and repurposing itself as the times required. Barack Obama used its plant as a backdrop for a speech about the economy early on in his 2008 campaign. Most presidential candidates eventually buzz through. The place has been manufacturing Chevrolets for 85 years. The congressman is stunned.

''Give us Cavaliers,'' he begs. ''Give us pickups.'' Any model other than the unpopular SUVs the plant is currently churning out, he means. ''You know you'll destroy this town if you do this!'' he yells into the phone.

Whether the closure of this fabled 4.8-million-square-foot facility does or does not destroy Janesville is for the reader to decide. Goldstein, a longtime staff writer for The Washington Post who was part of a reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002, opts for complexity over facile explanations and easy polemics. (Neither Obama nor Ryan comes off looking particularly good; and no, she does not conclude that these layoffs put Donald J. Trump in the White House.) Her book follows a clutch of characters over the course of five years, from 2008 to 2013, and concludes with an epilogue in the present, when unemployment in Janesville is less than 4 percent.

Terrific news, you might say. But that number belies some harsh realities on the ground, as we learn throughout the book. Real wages in the town have fallen. Marriages have collapsed. And Janesville, a town with an unusual level of civic commitment, unity and native spirit -- the Ryan family has been there for five generations -- has capitulated to the same partisan rancor that afflicts the rest of the nation.

It was not the sort of place, for instance, where a beloved local politician might find someone unfurling his middle finger at him during Labor Fest -- until 2011, which happened to be the year that Scott Walker, a flamboyantly anti-union and polarizing figure, took up residence in the governor's mansion. The town is now riven by ''an optimism gap,'' as Goldstein calls it, with dispossessed workers on one side and bullish businesspeople on the other.

''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.

The characters are especially memorable. This may be the first time since I began this job that I've wanted to send notes of admiration to three people in a work of nonfiction.

Readers will also finish ''Janesville'' with an extremely sobering takeaway: There's scant evidence that job retraining, possibly the sole item on the menu of policy options upon which Democrats and Republicans can agree, is at all effective.

In the case of the many laid-off workers in the Janesville area, the outcomes are decidedly worse for those who have attended the local technical college to learn a new trade. (Goldstein arrives at this conclusion, outlined in detail, by enlisting the help of local labor economists and poring over multiple data sets.) A striking number of dislocated G.M. employees don't even know how to use a computer when they first show up for classes at Blackhawk Technical College. ''Some students dropped out as soon as they found out that their instructors would not accept course papers written out longhand,'' Goldstein writes.

It makes you realize how challenging -- and humiliating -- it can be to reinvent oneself in midlife. To do so requires a kind of bravery for which no one gets a medal.

But perhaps the most powerful aspect of ''Janesville'' is its simple chronological structure, which allows Goldstein to show the chain reaction that something so calamitous as a plant closing can effect. Each falling domino becomes a headstone, signifying the death of the next thing.

Because the G.M. plant closes, so does the plant at the Lear Corporation, which supplied it with car seats and interiors. Because so many in Janesville are now out of work, nonprofits lose board members and contributions to local charities shrivel. Because their parents are out of work, students at Parker High start showing up for school both hungry and dirty. A social studies teacher starts the ''Parker Closet,'' which provides them with food and supplies. (Deri Wahlert: She's one of the people to whom I'd like to write a fan note.)

The fabric of hundreds of families unravels, as an itinerant class of fathers -- ''Janesville Gypsies,'' they call themselves -- start commuting to G.M. factories in Texas, Indiana and Kansas, just so they can maintain their wage of $28 an hour. Those who stay home invariably see their paychecks shrink drastically. One of the men Goldstein follows, Jerad Whiteaker, cycles through a series of unsatisfying, low-paying jobs, finally settling in one that pays less than half his former wage and offers no health insurance. His twin teenage girls -- to whom I'd also like to send awed notes -- share five jobs between them, earning so much money for their family that they compromise their eligibility for student loans.

You will learn a lot about the arbitrary rules and idiosyncrasies of our government programs from this book. They have as many treacherous cracks and crevices as a glacier -- and offer about as much warmth.

''Janesville'' is not without shortcomings. It can be overwhelming at first, with many characters raining down on the reader at once -- it's a bit like getting caught in a hailstorm of pickup sticks. (Though there's a cheat sheet in the front of the book, which helps.) There's almost no discussion of globalization and outsourcing jobs to Mexico, which seems a strange omission. Surely, the residents of Janesville must have an opinion about this?

But these are minor objections, ultimately. ''Janesville'' is eye-opening, important, a diligent work of reportage. I am sure Paul Ryan will read it. I wonder what he will say.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTOS: Amy Goldstein describes the human consequences that come after a community's main employer shuts down. (PHOTOGRAPH BY MELINA MARA)

QUOTED: "an engrossing investigation" "an evenhanded portrayal of workers, educators, business and community leaders, and politicians."
"a simultaneously enlightening and disturbing look at working-class lives in America's heartland."

Goldstein, Amy: JANESVILLE
Kirkus Reviews. (Mar. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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Goldstein, Amy JANESVILLE Simon & Schuster (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 4, 18 ISBN: 978-1-5011-0223-3

A Midwestern town struggles to survive in the aftermath of an economic disaster.Based on three years of probing interviews, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalist Goldstein makes her literary debut with an engrossing investigation of Janesville, Wisconsin, where General Motors, the town's major employer, closed its plant in 2008. Like Barbara Ehrenreich and George Packer, Goldstein reveals the shattering consequences of the plant's closing through an evenhanded portrayal of workers, educators, business and community leaders, and politicians--notably, Paul Ryan, a Janesville native who swept into town periodically. Like other politicians, Ryan made promises that proved empty. In 2012, Janesville voters chose Barack Obama over their native son. In 2016, when Wisconsin broke with its Democratic tradition and voted Republican, 52 percent of voters in Janesville's county supported Hillary Clinton. Janesville exemplifies the plight of many cities after sustaining industry leaves. Unemployment rose to 13 percent, and many former GM workers opted for federally subsidized job training. Yet such training, Goldstein discovered, rarely leads to solid employment. The head of the local community college, deluged with new students, found them shockingly deficient in skills: she designed a "boot camp" for students who did not know how to turn on a computer and a student success course for those with poor study skills. Many dropped out in frustration; some opted for any part-time work they could find; and the few who persisted often faced lack of job opportunities. Families struggled to pay mortgages for houses quickly becoming devalued, and they faced daunting medical costs without health coverage. Business leaders stepped in with optimistic reform measures, but their self-congratulatory work had little effect. Those in social services, repeatedly disappointed and disillusioned by lack of government interest, did manage to devise effective support strategies. The author saw the growing divide of two Janesvilles whose views were evident in the election, recall, and triumph of the anti-union governor, Scott Walker. Although by 2013, the town had recovered to some extent, most workers earned far below their former wages. A simultaneously enlightening and disturbing look at working-class lives in America's heartland.

Hochschild, Arlie. "Book World: Ruin and resilience in a factory town." Washington Post, 20 Apr. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490289911/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0a5826f1. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. Senior, Jennifer. "When the G.M. Plant Closed, Havoc Followed." New York Times, 20 Apr. 2017, p. C6(L). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490234362/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=43de740a. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. "Goldstein, Amy: JANESVILLE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A485105335/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3261a07a. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.

• Star Tribune
  http://www.startribune.com/review-janesville-an-american-story-by-amy-goldstein/419429844/
  Word count: 589

  QUOTED: "When authors try to juggle so many major characters in one book, the narrative drive often suffers, and the characters never come to life. Goldstein avoids those pitfalls, and the mostly chronological saga never loses its zip."

  Review: 'Janesville: An American Story,' by Amy Goldstein
  NONFICTION: A reporter explores what happened to life and jobs in Janesville, Wis., after its dominant employer closed.
  By STEVE WEINBERG Special to the Star Tribune APRIL 14, 2017 — 9:17AM
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  Amy Goldstein Photo by Melina Mara
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  When Washington Post reporter Amy Goldstein began paying attention to Janesville, Wis., the dominoes had started to fall in that city. General Motors, the dominant employer as operator of an automobile assembly factory, announced that the plant would close two days before Christmas 2008.

  The falling dominoes consisted of not only factory employees losing their livelihood, but also businesses that supplied General Motors with goods and services; retail stores that would lose cash-poor customers; public schools that would lose tax payments; career retraining programs that would become overwhelmed by demand; government unemployment benefit offices that had not budgeted for a massive influx; law enforcement agencies dealing with crimes hatched from desperation; suicide hot lines receiving an alarming increase in calls, and child welfare agencies without enough shelter beds.

  Taking a leave from the newspaper, Goldstein immersed herself in Janesville life; the book chronicles a five-year span through 2013. But instead of focusing completely on the devastation to the Janesville economy, she decided to intermingle the dominoes falling with a narrative of hope, an alternate emphasis on the Janesville faithful who plotted a revival.

  Her cast of major characters includes three families dependent on GM paychecks, three workers with other Janesville employers adversely affected by the factory shutdown, three educators, a banker, a wealthy businesswoman/philanthropist, a job retraining center director, a radio talk show host and two politicians.

  A major attraction of writing about the Janesville saga is tied to Washington, D.C. — Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is a Janesville native.

  Before the plant closed, Ryan could legitimately be called a local hero, a hometown guy made good; he was liked by many Democrats as well as Republicans. When Ryan could not negotiate the plant’s reopening, however, some of his luster faded. Goldstein portrays the ups and downs of Ryan in Janesville and Washington with great acuity.

  “Janesville: An American Story,” by Amy Goldstein

  “Janesville: An American Story,” by Amy Goldstein
  The stars of the book are the less famous folks. When authors try to juggle so many major characters in one book, the narrative drive often suffers, and the characters never come to life. Goldstein avoids those pitfalls, and the mostly chronological saga never loses its zip.

  Along the way, she shatters a lot of conventional wisdom.

  For example, the job retraining programs lauded by politicians often disappoint. Generosity offered by neighbors often does not play well when it looks like charity. And, perhaps most devastating of all, those lost high-paying jobs are not coming back.

  Steve Weinberg is a journalist in Columbia, Mo., and former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors.

  Janesville: An American Story
  By: Amy Goldstein.
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 351 pages, $27.
  Event: 7 p.m. May 2, Common Good Books, 38 S. Snelling Av., St. Paul.

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