Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town

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Description

For readers of Hillbilly Elegy and Strangers in Their Own Land

**A New York Post Must-Read Book, a Newsweek Best New Book, one of The Week‘s 20 Books to Read in 2017, one of Bustle‘s 16 Best Nonfiction Books Coming in February 2017**

“A devastating read…For somebody wondering why swing-state The us voted against the establishment in 2016, Mr. Alexander supplies numerous answers.” ―The Wall Street Journal

“This book hunts bigger game.” ―Laura Miller, Slate

In 1947, Forbes magazine declared Lancaster, Ohio the epitome of the all-American town. Lately it’s damaged, discouraged, and fighting for its future. In Glass House, journalist Brian Alexander uses the story of one town to show how seeds sown 35 years ago have sprouted to give us Trumpism, inequality, and an eroding national cohesion.

The Anchor Hocking Glass Company, once the world’s largest maker of glass tableware, used to be the base on which Lancaster’s society used to be built. As Glass House unfolds, bankruptcy looms. With get admission to to the company and its leaders, and Lancaster’s citizens, Alexander shows how financial engineering took hold in the 1980s, accelerated in the 21st Century, and wrecked the company. We follow CEO Sam Solomon, an African-American leading the nearly all-white town’s biggest private employer, as he tries to rescue the company from the New York private equity firm that hired him. Meanwhile, Alexander goes at the back of the scenes, entwined with the lives of residents as they wrestle with heroin, politics, high-interest lenders, low wage jobs, technology, and the new demands of American life: people like Brian Gossett, the fourth generation to work at Anchor Hocking; Joe Piccolo, first-time director of the once a year music festival who discovers the town will depend on him, and it, for salvation; Jason Roach, who police believed may have been Lancaster’s biggest drug dealer; and Eric Brown, a local football hero-turned-cop who comes to realize that he can never arrest Lancaster’s real problems.

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