New Books and Other Good Stuff at the Library: Recently Acquired Books Relating to Ohio

Since the 1970s, urban communities across the country have had to face the wrenching process of economic restructuring. As the media announce the latest plant closings and politicians slam each other for outsourcing jobs, events are too often framed with a kind of economic determinism that denies agency to individual communities. To what degree can industrial cities in such an era still imagine themselves as authors of their own economic fates? In Rust Belt Resistance, author Perry Bush explores this question by focusing on the small midwestern city of Lima, Ohio. When British Petroleum (BP) announced late in 1996 that it would close and demolish its refinery there—which at the time employed 500 people with a $31.5 million payroll—economic desperation loomed. Lima’s story, however, deviated from the usual sad narrative of other Midwest plant closures and began to assume a drama of its own. Led by an unlikely cast of characters—an uncommonly stubborn set of civic leaders, a conservative local newspaper publisher, and the city’s determined and progressive mayor—Lima refused to take its place quietly on the industrial scrap heap. Instead of collapsing in despair, the refinery’s workers continued to function as a model of industrial efficiency and hard work, partly in a determined effort to build profitability and preserve their jobs and also because hard work was the essence and tradition of this blue-collar town. In a story replete with a number of dramatic twists and turns, Bush describes how this collection of individuals led a resistant multinational corporation to a financial deal it could not refuse, located an acceptable buyer for the refinery, and saved not only a sizable share of the city’s financial foundation but also the community’s identity and self-respect. Rust Belt Resistance is a valuable instructional lesson for business and community leaders, scholars, and anyone interested in the continuing viability of American industrial cities.

Punch Me Up to the Gods introduces a powerful new talent in Brian Broome, whose early years growing up in Ohio as a dark-skinned Black boy harboring crushes on other boys propel forward this gorgeous, aching, and unforgettable debut. Brian's recounting of his experiences--in all their cringe-worthy, hilarious, and heartbreaking glory--reveal a perpetual outsider awkwardly squirming to find his way in. Indiscriminate sex and escalating drug use help to soothe his hurt, young psyche, usually to uproarious and devastating effect. A no-nonsense mother and broken father play crucial roles in our misfit's origin story. But it is Brian's voice in the retelling that shows the true depth of vulnerability for young Black boys that is often quietly near to bursting at the seams.Cleverly framed around Gwendolyn Brooks's poem "We Real Cool," the iconic and loving ode to Black boyhood, Punch Me Up to the Gods is at once playful, poignant, and wholly original. Broome's writing brims with swagger and sensitivity, bringing an exquisite and fresh voice to ongoing cultural conversations about Blackness in America.

Ohio Poet of the Year 2015. "Reading Abandoned Homeland, Jeff Gundy's new collection, left me with awe and envy. Such exquisite lines about belief, desire, small-town life, grief, grace, mercy, failure, and faith. As the collection's title poem claims, we may all indeed be exiles on a mutilated, imperfect planet, but it's a world where, paradoxically, 'We'll sing/and sway, praise each other and walk back in the dark/holding hands. Then we'll gather what we need and head/off again, for good.' Another poem asks, 'How will you spend your small, strange, unrepeatable life?' I've spent some of mine living in these poems, so worth every minute" (Kate Fox, former editor of Ohioana Quarterly). Michael Martone writes: "In the elegant and graceful meditations of Abandoned Homeland, Jeff Gundy pilots the levitational lyric like an ace. He demonstrates that it is still available to us, weightless even while embedded, as it is here, in the raw catastrophe of our basest histories. I am so drawn to the thickets of these long-lined couplets, breeched by the burble of percolating song. I am taken with the poems' shape, the checkerboard graphic of the Midwestern landscape."

The question of America's identity has rarely been more urgent than now, and no American place has ever been more reflective of that identity than Ohio. David Giffels, a lifelong resident of the "bellwether" state, has spent a quarter century writing and thinking about what it means to live in what he calls "an all-American buffet, an uncannily complete everyplace." With Cleveland as the end of the North, Cincinnati as the beginning of the South, Youngstown as the end of the East, and Hicksville (yes, Hicksville) as the beginning of the Midwest, Ohio offers important insight into the state of the nation. As a historic 2020 presidential election approaches, Barnstorming Ohio is Giffels' account of a year on Ohio's roads, visiting people and places that offer valuable reflections of the national questions and concerns, as well as astounding electoral clairvoyance -- since 1896, Ohio has accurately chosen the winner in twenty-nine of thirty-one presidential elections, more than any other state. With lyricism and a native's keen eye, Barnstorming Ohio takes readers into the living room of a man whose life was upended just shy of retirement by General Motors' shutdown of its Lordstown assembly plant. It offers an exclusive view into the presidential campaign of Ohio Democratic hopeful Tim Ryan. It takes us into the sodden soybean fields of farmers struggling to outlast the dual punch of a protracted trade war and historic rainfall, and to an indie rock music festival in Dayton a week after a mass shooting there. We enter the otherworld of long-dormant shopping malls as Amazon transforms them into vast new fulfillment centers. On the lighter side, Giffels makes a "beer run" into Ohio's booming craft brewing industry and revisits the legend (and the bird-nest toupee) of Jim Traficant, a larger-than-life Ohio politician whom many have called the "proto-Trump." In a year when Americans are seeking answers, Barnstorming Ohio offers rare and carefully nuanced access to the people who have always held them. Finalist for the 2021 Ohioana Award.

By following the struggle for survival of one small-town hospital and the patients who walk, or are carried, through its doors, The Hospital takes readers into the world of America's broken medical industry. Bryan, Ohio's hospital, is losing money, making it vulnerable to big health systems seeking domination, and Phil Ennen, CEO, is fighting to preserve its independence. Meanwhile, Bryan, a town of 8,500 people in Ohio's northwest corner, is still trying to recover from the Great Recession. As local leaders struggle to address the town's problems, and the hospital fights for its life amid a rapidly consolidating medical and hospital industry, a thirty-nine-year-old diabetic fights for his limbs, and a fifty-five-year-old contractor lies dying in the emergency room. With riveting storytelling, Alexander strips away the wonkiness of policy to reveal Americans' struggle for health as they battle economic forces and a medical system so fragile it blows apart when the COVID-19 pandemic hits. This book offers a blueprint for how we created the crisis we're in.

Line Study of a Motel Clerk examines a family’s century-long effort to make a home in a changing world. Pitinii Davis takes readers on a heart-stopping journey through her lineage, with all the grit, beauty and truth of the working class immigrant struggle. One side of the family opens a trucking motel, the other a laundry. The businesses change hands through three generations as the industrial steel valley booms and busts. When these two disparate families become one, the new generation must question what it means to endure a place, a culture, a language, and a history. Line Study of a Motel Clerk was chosen as a finalist for the 2018 Ohioana Book Awards. Line Study of a Motel Clerk was recently selected as a finalist for the 2017 Berru Award from the National Jewish Book Council.

The Mayor of Goosetown is a story about recovering times in our lives that have nearly vanished. We realize we can't remember everything about our past. We search for signs and symbols to jar our recollections. Joyce Dyer weaves her story around the shadows that remain of her first five years. Her uncle, the self-proclaimed mayor of Goosetown, accompanies her as they travel to unearth lost years. She takes the reader on an erratic and unpredictable process. Is the excursion a wild goose chase or can she really find home? The Mayor of Goosetown is a story about recovering times in our lives that have nearly vanished. We realize we can't remember everything about our past. We search for signs and symbols to jar our recollections. Joyce Dyer weaves her story around the shadows that remain of her first five years. Her uncle, the self-proclaimed mayor of Goosetown, accompanies her as they travel to unearth lost years. She takes the reader on an erratic and unpredictable process. Is the excursion a wild goose chase or can she really find home?

All that kid wants to do is stick his nose in a book," Michael Dirda's steelworker father used to complain, worried about his son's passion for reading. In this memoir, acclaimed literary journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Dirda re-creates his boyhood in rust-belt Ohio, first in the working-class town of Lorain, then at Oberlin College. In addition to his colorful family and friends, An Open Book also features the great writers and fictional characters who fueled Dirda's imagination: from Green Lantern to Sherlock Holmes, from Candy to Proust. The result is an affectionate homage to small-town America in the 1950s and 1960s--Slavic wedding feasts, catechism classes, summer jobs in the steel mill, school fights, sweepstakes contests, first dates, and a canary-yellow Mustang--as well as to what could arguably be called the last great age of reading.