American Microcosm
Called by Laura Miller of Slate part of “a new and still fairly accidental genre: the on-the-ground Trump explainer,” Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town by Brian Alexander (Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press; OverDrive Sample) jumped into the top 100 on Amazon’s sales rankings today.
Yesterday, Alexander was interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air about his book on Lancaster, Ohio and the Anchor Hocking glass factory which powered the city through the 40s, 50s, and 60s. He explains that the wives of the company’s executives “threw themselves into the town … they made sure the sidewalks got repaired, the streets got paved, they attended city council meetings. This was a core of civic leadership.”
Then, in the 1980s, Carl Icahn began a highly profitable move to extract money from the company. As a result, details Alexander, it eventually suffered a hostile takeover. The first thing the new owners did was “fire all of the executives and close down the headquarters … So you’ve taken away the executives, you’ve taken away their wives, their families. … [It was] devastating for the town.”
Miller calls the book part of a genre of nonfiction “illuminating the desperation driving white small-town Americans, as told by a native son. The vanguard title in this pack is J.D. Vance’s surprise success Hillbilly Elegy.”
Glass House she says “is less personal, less tortured, a work of journalism far more willing to indict … This book hunts bigger game … [it] reads like an odd—and oddly satisfying—fusion of George Packer’s The Unwinding and one of Michael Lewis’ real-life financial thrillers.”