With a Foreword by Bruce Springsteen

In Someplace 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). In Someplace 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.

About the Author

Dale Maharidge is Professor at Columbia University’s School of Journalism. He has published seven books, including And Their Children After Them, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass. Michael S. Williamson is a photographer at the Washington Post who has collaborated with Maharidge on many of his books.

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

Reviews

"Someplace Like America is unrelenting prose. . . . There's something doggedly heroic in this commitment to one of journalism's least glamorous, least remunerative subjects."
— New Yorker

"Pulitzer Prize–winning author and photographer team Maharidge and Williamson continue their heartfelt chronicle of the travails facing America's poor and homeless . . . Presenting new stories from today's ‘Great Depression’ and updating their accounts of those impoverished during the recession of the '80s and the supposed boom years of the '90s, this book evokes the Depression-era collaboration of Walker Evans and James Agee.”
— Publishers Weekly

"The strength of Someplace Like America is Maharidge's ability to tell the story of the down and out, a story made all the more real by the photographs of Michael Williamson. Yes, perhaps sociologists could learn to humanize our subjects, especially in quantitative accounts of inequality . . . Instead, the real challenge is to understand why we have not witnessed a broad-based class mobilization to challenge the massive growth in inequality in America that Maharidge and Williamson so deftly document in this book."
— Contemporary Sociology

“The really wonderful thing about the book is that it's not just a cavalcade of ruin porn—it's very honest about the hardships that the working poor face on a daily basis, but it shines as bright a light on the resilience that Maharidge ultimately hopes will be everyone's salvation. You'll meet some really interesting people, and get to experience what is really a legitimate journalistic adventure. . . . It comes with a huge clutch of Michael Williamson's excellent photojournalism as well.”
— Huffington Post

“The evening (and morning and 24 hour) news spends a great deal of time on the American economy, but watching well dressed and perfectly groomed anchors talk about statistics, show political sound bites, and interview down on their luck families just isn’t the same as reading Dale Maharidge’s words or looking at Michael S. Williamson’s photographs."
— PopMatters

“Deserves high praise . . . . Undeniable relevance to today’s American experience.”
— Foreword Reviews

“Through powerful essays and haunting photographs we experience how typical middle class Americans have endured job loss, poverty and homelessness.”
— Dayton Daily News

“Written in the grand tradition of the early 20th-century muckrakers—Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker—this is a book that occasionally confounds as it shifts from decade to decade, story to story, but which drives home its central theme that America has lost its way. Maharidge 's straightforward-but-impassioned prose and Williamson's gritty black-and-white photographs make you angry. They're an indictment.”
— American Studies

"Future journalists and citizen bloggers should study this book for its craft. . . . It's full of hard-core examples of the kind of reporting that defeats stereotypes and challenges the status quo. . . . Williamson's black-and-white photos also tell powerful stories. . . . They are breathtaking in scope and detail."
— New Labor Forum

“Maharidge and Williamson deliver a heart-wrenching and thought-provoking work. . . . Williamson’s stunning black-and-white photographs span three decades and capture pockets of a crumbling America that few have witnessed. He and Maharidge give a much-needed voice to the people who continue to fall through the cracks—people who want neither your pity nor your politics as they fight to survive and to regain a sense of pride in themselves and in their nation.”
— Santa Fe New Mexican

“These boys saw the floorboards giving out while the rest of America danced in the pig and whistle. Maharidge and Williamson have a document here that may be even more important in a generation than it is today.”—Charlie LeDuff, author of Work and Other Sins: Life in New York City and Thereabouts

“Through the voices and stories of working-class people, Maharidge and Williamson provide insight into the current situation, reminding us of the history of economic struggle and the importance of understanding our culture from the bottom up.”—John Russo, co-author of Steeltown U.S.A.: Work and Memory in Youngstown

“This is a deeply felt and beautifully crafted book. Maharidge and Williamson are brave and clear-eyed in chronicling the struggle of America’s workers.”—Todd DePastino, author of Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America

"In this moving and urgent book, Maharidge and Williamson continue to dig through the social wreckage of three decades of economic plunder, courageously documenting the uprooted and displaced, the uncertain and the fearful. Someplace Like America peers into the dark heart of a society that has turned its back on working people--and that may be on the cusp of abandoning its dignity as well. In the smoldering occupational ruins of what once was, Maharidge also manages to find hopeful embers of what might one day be. A disturbing retrospective on twenty-five years of reporting on the long-term dissolution of the American dream."—Jefferson Cowie, Cornell University, author of Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews