With a Foreword by Bruce Springsteen

InSomeplace Like America, writer Dale Maharidge and photographer Michael S. Williamson take us to the working-class heart of America, bringing to life—through shoe leather reporting, memoir, vivid stories, stunning photographs, and thoughtful analysis—the deepening crises of poverty and homelessness. The story begins in 1980, when the authors joined forces to cover the America being ignored by the mainstream media—people living on the margins and losing their jobs as a result of deindustrialization. Since then, Maharidge and Williamson have traveled more than half a million miles to investigate the state of the working class (winning a Pulitzer Prize in the process). InSomeplace Like America, they follow the lives of several families over the thirty-year span to present an intimate and devastating portrait of workers going jobless. This brilliant and essential study—begun in the trickle-down Reagan years and culminating with the recent banking catastrophe—puts a human face on today’s grim economic numbers. It also illuminates the courage and resolve with which the next generation faces the future.
 

With a Foreword by Bruce Springsteen

InSomeplace Like America, writer Dale Maharidge and photographer Michael S. Williamson take us to the working-class heart of America, bringing to life—through shoe leather reporting, memoir, vivid stories, stunning photographs, and thoughtful analysis—the deepening crises of poverty and homelessness. The story begins in 1980, when the authors joined forces to cover the America being ignored by the mainstream media—people living on the margins and losing their jobs as a result of deindustrialization. Since then, Maharidge and Williamson have traveled more than half a million miles to investigate the state of the working class (winning a Pulitzer Prize in the process). InSomeplace Like America, they follow the lives of several families over the thirty-year span to present an intimate and devastating portrait of workers going jobless. This brilliant and essential study—begun in the trickle-down Reagan years and culminating with the recent banking catastrophe—puts a human face on today’s grim economic numbers. It also illuminates the courage and resolve with which the next generation faces the future.
 

Contents

Foreword by Bruce Springsteen
Preface to the 2013 Edition
Someplace Like America: An Introduction
Snapshots from the Road, 2009

Part 1 America Begins a Thirty-Year Journey to Nowhere: The 1980s
1 On Becoming a Hobo
2 Necropolis
3 New Timer
4 Home Sweet Tent
5 True Bottom

Part 2 The Journey Continues: The 1990s
6 Inspiration: The Two-Way Highway
7 Waiting for an Explosion
8 When Bruce Met Jenny

Part 3 A Nation Grows Hu ngrier: 2000
9 Hunger in the Homes
10 The Working Poor: Maggie and Others in Austin
11 Mr. Murray on Maggie

Part 4 Updating People and Places: The Late 2000s
12 Reinduction
13 Necropolis: After the Apocalypse
14 New Timer: Finding Mr. Heisenberg Instead
15 Home Sweet Tent Home
16 Maggie: “Am I Doing the Right Thing?” 
17 Maggie on Mr. Murray

Part 5 America with the Lid Ripped Off: The Late 2000s
18 Search and Rescue
19 New Orleans Jazz
20 Scapegoats in the Sun
21 The Dark Experiment
22 The Big Boys
23 Anger in Suburban New Jersey

Part 6 Rebuilding Ourselves, Then Taking America on a Journey to Somewhere New
24 Zen in a Crippled New Hampshire Mill Town
25 A Woman of the Soil in Kansas City
26 The Phoenix?
27 Looking Forward — and Back
Coda
Afterword to the 2013 Edition: Letter from the Apocalypse
Acknowledgments and Credits
Notes