Janesville: An American Story
Two days before Christmas of 2008, General Motors’ oldest operating assembly plant, in Paul Ryan’s hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin, shut down in the midst of the Great Recession. After thousands of jobs vanished from this small, proud city, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Amy Goldstein spent years immersed in Janesville to illuminate the human consequences of one of the nation’s biggest political issues. Janesville: An American Story is an intimate account, taking readers 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 prosperous, healthy working class.
Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Humanities Council as part of its Working Lives Project, which asks Wisconsinites “What does work mean in your life?” Click here to talk shop and learn more!
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.