Charles LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy (New York: The Penguin Press, 2013) ("Once the nation's richest city, Detroit is now its poorest. It is the country's illiteracy and dropout capital, where children must leave their books at school and bring toilet paper from home. It is the unemployment capital, where half the adult population does not work at a consistent job. There are firemen with no boots, cops with no cars, teachers with no pencils, city council members with telephones tapped by the FBI, and too many grandmothers with no tears left to give." But Detroit can no longer be ignored, because what happened here is happening out there. Neighborhoods from Phoenix to Los Angeles to Miami are blighted with empty homes and people with idle hands. Americans are swimming in debt, and the prospects of servicing the debt grows slimmer by the day as good-paying jobs continue to evaporate or relocate to foreign lands. Economists talk about the inevitable turnaround. But standing here in Michigan, it seems to me that the fundamentals are no longer there to make the good life." "Go ahead and laugh at Detroit. Because you are laughing at yourself." "In cities and towns across the country, whole factories are auctioned off. Men with trucks haul away tool-and-die machines, aluminum siding, hoists, drinking fountains. It is the ripping out of the country's mechanical heart right before our eyes." "A newly hired autoworker will earn $14 an hour. This, adjusted for inflation, is three cents less than what Henry Ford was paying in 1914 when he announced the $5 day. And, of course, Ford isn't hiring. Come to Detroit, drive the empty, shattered boulevard, and the decrepitude of the place all rolls out in a numb, continuous fact. After enough hours staring into it, it starts to appear normal. Average. Everyday." Id. at 5-6. Yes, this is the New Normal. The New America!).
George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (New York: Farar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) ("After almost a decade in politics, [Jeff Connaughton] was thirty-six and broke, renting a modest apartment in Virginia. In December 1995, he took a job as a junior associate with Covington & Burling, a top Washington law firm. If he made partner, he'd become a millionaire." "He hated the work. A minute ago he'd been briefing the president and battling Congress, and now he was literally on his knees, sifting through fifty boxes of documents one page at a time doing an attorney-client privilege review, or stuck at his desk, writing memos on behalf of a a silver mine that was polluting groundwater in Idaho. As far as Connaughton was concerned, the firm was just churning the client for billable hours. He did research on another case in which the plaintiff had been moving bottles of acid with a forklift, accidentally broke some bottles, and burned most of his body as he repeatedly slipped into the acid. Covington was representing the company." ''I hope you're asking me to research whether there's enough money in the world to compensate this man,' Connaughtion told the partner who gave him the assignment. 'No, I'm not,' the partner replied." Id. at 118. From the bookjacket: "American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown, and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. In The Unwinding, George packer . . . tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives. [] The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation. Packer's novelistic and kaleidoscopic history of the new America is his most ambitious work to date." Before reading Packer's latest, I had been reflecting on the unraveling of the so-called "American Dream." Take a look around! Who delivers your newspaper in the morning? Once upon a time a neighborhood kid, a paperboy--and sometimes a papergirl--would walk around the neighborhood delivering the newspapers. Now it is some grownup, driving a car. Who cuts your grass, weeds your garden, rake the leaves in the fall, washes your windows, and performs minor chores around your house? You don't do these. Your own kids don't do these. Rather, you have a lawn care service to mow, weed, and rake your 200-square-feet patch of grass. Professional window washers now clean your windows. When adults have as their professions performing tasks that teenagers use to do, call it what you will, but don't call it progress and don't deny the unraveling of the American Dream. What remains is a dimmer dream, a reduced America.).
Lisa Prevost, Snob Zones: Fear, Prejudice, and Real Estate (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013) (From the bookjacket: "Towns with strict zoning are the best towns, aren't they? They're all about preserving local 'character,' protecting the natural environment, and maintaining attractive neighborhoods. Right?" "In this bold challenge to conventional wisdom, Lisa Prevost strips away the quaint facades of these desirable towns to reveal the uglier impulses behind their proud allegiance to local control. These eye-opening stories illustrate the outrageous lengths to which town leaders and affluent residents will go to prohibit housing that might attract the 'wrong' sort of people. Prevost takes readers to a rural second-home community that is so restrictive that its celebrity residents may soon outnumber its children, to a struggling fishing village as it rises up against farmworker housing open to Latino immigrants, and to a northern lake community that brazenly deems itself out of bounds to apartment dwellers. From blueberry barrens of Down East to the Gold Coast of Connecticut, these stories show how communities have seemingly cast aside the all-American credo of 'opportunity for all' in favor of 'I was here first.'" "Prevost links this 'every town for itself' mentality to a host of regional afflictions, including a shrinking population of young adults, ugly sprawl, unbearable highway congestion, and widening disparities in income and educational achievement. Snob Zones warns that this pattern of exclusion is unsustainable and raises thought-provoking questions about what it means to be a community in post-recession America.").
Roxana Robinson, Sparta: A Novel (New York: Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) ("They lived right on the edge, those lawn guys. It was like being in a revolution, coming here illegally. No language, no green cards, always at risk, in fear but determined to work. People claimed they were taking jobs from Americans, but that was bullshit. Americans wouldn't take those jobs. Those jobs were too menial for people living the American dream, which they did by playing video games and drinking beer. Americans hired these guys to mow their lawns and then complained abut illegal aliens. He thought of Ali and the grimy men lined up in the clearing room." Id. at 335.).
