Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Perhaps it's that, as the saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt. As a fifth generation native of southern Wisconsin--descended from immigrant dairy farmers who prospered in Rock, Green, and Dane Counties, but also of a father with an 8th grade education who spent a working life in a foundry in suburban Milwaukee--perhaps I'm too close to Marv and Matt Wopat and their colleagues to see the heroism in showing up to work everyday and hoping for the best. But what I see here is just what I saw in J.D. Vance: the apotheosis of good people whose lives are shaped by profound insularity and a deep fear of change. Who believe with unassailable certainty that the arc of American economic expansion after the war--an anachronism just as surely as plantation farming in the South and textile milling in England during the 18th and 19th centuries--constitutes an eternal truth. Frankly, I find little in any of that to exalt. Compare, as fairly as you can, the stories of George Parker and Joseph Craig, and even the stories of my immigrant ancestors, and those of (I'm willing to hazard) many of the former line workers at Janesville Assembly. What's gone wrong in the 100 years since? When did the descendants of intrepid people become opiated by the notion that factory jobs paying comparatively high wages for unskilled work--not to mention the campers, basement rec rooms, hunting land, and Packers season tickets that those wages buy--are a birthright, to be handed down from generation to generation without any of the risks of ownership? Where does nobility reside in an unskilled worker, spending to the edge of solvency, who's now so afraid of the unknown--or, in any event, the uncomfortable--that he won't train for a new job that requires a move to, or even immediately consider a relocation that preserves his lifestyle but that requires starting over in (perish the thought), a new town 200 or 400 or 800 miles away? Plainly, I don't like the story. As for the book, it's competently told, at least. I do find the author's approach rather syrupy. Whether she set out with a disposition to lionize the lineworker or whether she simply warmed up to people who are obviously honest and hardworking, there's a consistent tone that's better suited to a high school essay about grandpa who served in the war than to a vigorous piece of journalism. The consistent use of first names is sometimes distracting; why is the congressman from Wisconsin's first district called "Paul," and the former senator from Wisconsin's 15th district "Tim"? Just because they were born in Janesville? (Rick Wagoner of GM is "Wagoner" and Jim Doyle, a native of nearby Madison, is "Wisconsin's governor.) The book does require consistent and unflinching focus, and for that the author deserves credit. If her work becomes required reading at Janesville Parker and Janesville Craig, and at a thousand other schools in the Midwest where immigrant ambition has lost its way, it may yet be a worthy read.