Review by New York Times Review
WHAT DOES THE ESSAYIST David Giffels have in common with LeBron James, Chrissie Hynde, the Professional Bowlers Association and Devo? They all originated in the Rubber Capital of the World. Born at the end of the baby boom in a city cloaked in smoke, Giffels came of age just as Goodrich, Firestone and General Tire were high-tailing it out of Akron, Ohio, chasing nonunion labor and sunnier climes. Almost a third of the city's population fled after the closures, along with the pop stars, the bowling association and, most crushingly, LeBron. But Giffels stuck around to document every empty Main Street storefront and every piece of the region's postindustrial detritus, down to a dirty diaper frozen atop a Lake Erie swell. "The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches From the Rust Belt" is the newspaper-columnist-turned-professor's fourth book, following his 2008 memoir, "All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House." His essays plumb the city historically, culturally and personally, from the boom-bust cycle that mirrored Detroit's to the great blizzard of '78 to teaching his teenage son to drive. Giffels's voice is friendly, his aesthetic honed by architectural salvage, Nine Inch Nails and a gritty nightclub named for what it used to be, the Bank. Like balls thunking from a bowling alley return chute, every essay eventually lands in the same, cumulatively redundant place: the assertion that Akron should exalt in its defeats rather than cringe. His details are so vibrant and fresh, though, that much of the thematic hammering is forgivable. Giffels seems to be trying too hard on purpose. The son of a college-educated engineer, he casts himself as the Rust Belt Everyman, part of the "wealthy working class." But by the book's end, the only displaced worker featured at any length is his best friend and confidant, John Puglia, who was canned from his corporate job while vacationing in France - a man who found even better work after three months of unemployment. (Giffels dedicates the book to Puglia, who died of cancer in July.) The dearth of blue-collar workers does raise the question: Is it authentic to laud a blue-collar ethos without bringing any work-boot wearers to life? Yearning is at the heart of this self-conscious civic portrait. Akron invented hamburgers (or so claims the Menches Bros, restaurant). Akron made the suit John Glenn wore when he first orbited the earth. Akron is where the producers of the film "Demolition Man" planned to blow up an abandoned Goodrich factory. "We, being Akronites, had taken this news as flattery: Hollywood had noticed," Giffels writes. (A private investor quashed the plan by pulling a last-minute save on the plant.) Giffels shows us a city picked clean of industrial tycoons and minus some 40,000 residents. But he argues that it's also a place where one can still score a fixer-upper in a decent neighborhood for less than $100,000 - thank you, rubber barons! - and have time to enjoy it because rush hour is only 10 minutes long. Inside the Goodwill bins he discovers "too-recent high school yearbooks and ... plastic, gold bowling trophies that ought to have been gathering dust in the attic of a house where someone ought to have stayed until retirement and then death." Giffels bristles at the journalistic interloper trudging in from Chicago or New York to explain Ohio voters or indulge in ruin porn - pretty pictures of demolished plants. He salvages those smokestack bricks, for his writing and the restoration of his front stoop. Though he revels in the foibles of his city, Giffels defends it vigorously, not unlike the way Carl Hiaasen lambastes Florida developers, Kevin Cullen rages against Boston gangsters or David Simon illuminates the scars of Baltimore. A region on the mend has found its voice, and he's wearing an ironic bowling shirt - with his actual name embroidered on the patch. Giffels shows us a city picked clean of industrial tycoons and minus some 40,000 residents. BETH MACY'S book, "Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town," won the 2013 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award and will be published in July.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 11, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
Give us something to root for, Akron, Ohio, writer and professor Giffels says near the beginning of this collection of personal essays about his embattled home state. Ohio once was home to manufacturing plants, industry, prosperity. That began to change in the 1960s, when factories began to close, and the dismantling of the state and of Akron specifically continues to this day. And it's not just a figurative dismantling: one of the most moving essays here describes the author's thoughts as he watched an old Firestone smokestack being literally dismantled, brick by brick, on a summer's day. Giffels' essays put a human face on daily life in today's Ohio, while reminding readers of all the things Ohio has given the world: from the Converse Chuck Taylor sneaker to rockers Devo and Chrissie Hynde, to the hamburger (well, probably not, but Ohio's claim to the burger makes a heck of a good story). An interesting and occasionally moving portrait of a place that, despite its decades-long downward slide, remains, for many, a pretty good place to live.--Pitt, David Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A native Ohioan who's always lived in his home town of Akron, Giffels-an English professor and author of three books-has a unique perspective on Midwestern history. His latest book is a collection of articles written on the distinctive culture of adversity and loss experienced by those in the Midwest who have seen everything taken from them, from their factory jobs to their rock bands and even their sports icons. Giffels treats all these things with equal gravitas, an approach that lends itself both to his signature dry humor and to a heartfelt analysis of what drives his neighbors to continue. We follow Giffels in a roughly chronological journey through his life, beginning with his school days and ending with his son's first attempt at driving. Along the way Giffels riffs on varying subjects like the origin of hamburgers, his own poetry, and bowling's vital importance to the Rust Belt, in abrupt asides that are sometimes in desperate need of segues. Regardless, the portrait painted here is an honest and revealing one, illuminating the cultural factors that have given a strange, shadowy sort of hope to millions of Americans. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Appealing, original fusion of personal essay collection and Rust Belt post-mortem. Giffels (English/Univ. of Akron; All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House, 2008, etc.) takes an audacious approach to considering his 1970s adolescence in Akron, Ohio, and his life there ever since. He became aware of the hardscrabble region's ingrained traditions and civic pride as they were being blown away by its declining economic infrastructure. While his essays are funny and crisply rendered, there's an undertone of wonderment at the sheer loss of functionality and productive might in such places: "Generations knew this part of the country as the region that built modern America," writes the author. "I'm of the first generation that never saw any of that." The essays sketch a rough arc of Giffels' life as set against the rambling decay of postindustrial Akron and Cleveland (where his family rooted for the perpetually losing Browns and Cavaliers). As the author reached adolescence, caroused within the region's vibrant underground-rock scene and began a career at the Akron Beacon Journal, he realized that the physical entropy and economic marginalization of the region somehow fueled its survivors with a perverse vitality as they attempted to make art or music or simply survive. "Recognizing the value of forgotten or broken things seems, at least in my part of the country, to be the story of America in the twenty-first century," he writes. Standout essays include an account of watching the cavernous used bookstore that sparked his literary passion burn down, his hilarious season as a ball boy for the dispirited Cavaliers and youthful encounters with regional traditions: strong drink, bowling, thrift stores and punk rock. The author's tone is relaxed and approachable, yet he never loses sight of the social costs incurred by the alleged obsolescence of the blue-collar Midwest. These seasoned dispatches convey an important narrative of regional marginalization; Giffels' work deserves to avoid that fate.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
