Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great DepressionWith a Foreword by Bruce Springsteen In Someplace Like America, writer Dale Maharidge and photographer Michael S. Williamson take us to the working-class heart of America, bringing to life—through shoe leather reporting, memoir, vivid stories, stunning photographs, and thoughtful analysis—the deepening crises of poverty and homelessness. The story begins in 1980, when the authors joined forces to cover the America being ignored by the mainstream media—people living on the margins and losing their jobs as a result of deindustrialization. Since then, Maharidge and Williamson have traveled more than half a million miles to investigate the state of the working class (winning a Pulitzer Prize in the process). In Someplace Like America, they follow the lives of several families over the thirty-year span to present an intimate and devastating portrait of workers going jobless. This brilliant and essential study—begun in the trickle-down Reagan years and culminating with the recent banking catastrophe—puts a human face on today’s grim economic numbers. It also illuminates the courage and resolve with which the next generation faces the future. |
Contents
ParT | 5 |
ParT 4 | 100 |
Finding Mr Heisenberg instead | 112 |
Home Sweet Tent Home | 117 |
am i doing the right Thing? | 128 |
Maggie on Mr Murray | 133 |
THE LATE 2000s | 134 |
Search and rescue | 137 |
The big boys | 168 |
anger in Suburban New Jersey | 177 |
REBUILDING OURSELVES THEN TAKING AMERICA ON A JOURNEY TO SOMEWHERE NEW | 182 |
Zen in a Crippled New Hampshire Mill Town | 185 |
a Woman of the Soil in kansas City | 190 |
The Phoenix? | 195 |
Looking Forward and back | 200 |
Coda | 216 |
New orleans Jazz | 143 |
Scapegoats in the Sun | 152 |
ParT 6 | 157 |
The dark Experiment | 164 |
Letter from the apocalypse | 230 |
acknowledgments and Credits | 244 |
Notes | 248 |
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