I'm a writer at Civic Ventures and a host on Pitch Fork Economics. I run a current events book club at a bookstore here in Seattle called Third Place Books

Seward Park.

We've been meeting for almost three years now.

Our first meeting was the first Wednesday of December

after Donald Trump was elected and we've met every month since. The first book that

we did was a book that I did not enjoy at all.

It was Hillbilly Elegy, which became a bestseller

after Trump won the presidency.

That sort of had the trappings of a red state tell-all,

and that was why people in blue

states and cities were interested in it but it turned out to be sort of a

conservative bootstrap story disguised as a memoir and it maintained that there were

good poor people and bad poor people and that poor people were poor because they chose to be, which is not true and also kind of frankly gross.

But we read another book in our book club that turned out to be Hillbiliology done right.

And it was Washington Post reporter Amy Goldstein's book, Janesville, an American story.

Janesville is a non-fiction book.

It is set in former House Speaker Paul Ryan's hometown.

And it documents what happened to the locals of Janesville when the local GM plant, which

provided most of the jobs for Janesville closed its doors forever.

So Goldstein just meets former GM employees and just sort of follows them around as they either find new careers or consider moving away or

struggle with addiction and she just reports on what they're doing and over the course of years.

Janesville is kind of heartbreaking to read because these are people who thought they had their lives all figured out.

...