By Jim Heffernan
This is one of those rare books that I just couldn’t put down after I started reading it. It set me off on a binge to read her other books, “Factory Man”(2016), “Dopesick”(2018), “Raising Lazarus”(2020). All are books that grew out of good journalism and deeply caring about real problems that beset rural America — drugs, globalization and a divided America.
Beth Macy and I have a lot in common. We’re both “boomers” (I’m an old one at 79 and she’s a young one at 58). We’ve both seen what happened to rural towns in the last few decades. We’re both saddened by the advantages we had but are not available for those entering adulthood today. Beth grew up in what we now call a dysfunctional family. Her father was an alcoholic and they were always poor. A Pell Grant gave her a college education and took her away from her hometown of Urbana, Ohio. She returned to Urbana after career in journalism to help care for her dying mother in 2021 and to write her fourth book about what happened to her hometown and to her family in the decades between 1980 and today.
Here’s a couple of excerpts I enjoyed.
“Across the United States, bullies have upended our peace and prosperity by turning too many of us against our most vulnerable people: women and girls, the poor, queer people, immigrants, people of color. They have turned the people of our home towns-and members of our own families-into people we still love but often struggle to like.” Page 304
”For blue-collar workers left to fend for themselves, many of them now working service jobs for half their previous pay and no benefits, the shift to unfettered free trade was like opening a velvet box and finding a turd inside. The Democratic strategist David Axelrod had a better (or at least more polite) metaphor: “I’m so proud of my association with Barack Obama, but the Democratic Party was the party that brought and heralded free trade. We lied to people and said all boats would be lifted somehow. Well, it was a tide that lifted a lot of yachts. A lot of the smaller boats got shipwrecked. A lot of people’s lives were changed for the worse.” Page 47
Published October 7, 2025, 354 pages (45 notes and acknowledgements) Available at Cloud and Leaf Bookstore, Manzanita and Tillamook County Library
As always, discussion welcome at codger817@gmail.com