Overview

The Anchor Hocking Glass Company, once the world's largest maker of glass tableware, was the base on which Lancaster's society was built. As Glass House unfolds, bankruptcy looms. With access to the company and its leaders, and Lancaster's citizens, Alexander shows how financial engineering took hold in the 1980s, accelerated in the 21st Century, and wrecked the company. We follow CEO Sam Solomon, an African-American leading the nearly all-white town's biggest private employer, as he tries to rescue the company from the New York private equity firm that hired him. Meanwhile, Alexander goes behind the scenes, entwined with the lives of residents as they wrestle with heroin, politics, high-interest lenders, low wage jobs, technology, and the new demands of American life: people like Brian Gossett, the fourth generation to work at Anchor Hocking; Joe Piccolo, first-time director of the annual music festival who discovers the town relies on him, and it, for salvation; Jason Roach, who police believed may have been Lancaster's biggest drug dealer; and Eric Brown, a local football hero-turned-cop who comes to realize that he can never arrest Lancaster's real problems.

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9781665143462

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This book should be required reading for people trying to understand Trumpism, inequality, and the sad state of a needlessly wrecked rural America. I wish I had written it. -- Beth Macy, New York Times bestselling author Glass House is among the best of the books...[on] the role that greed and the collapse of once solid institutions played in the demise of small-town, middle-class America. -- Newsweek [Alexander] does a remarkable job. -- New Yorker A devastating portrait. -- Wall Street Journal [An] essential book to understand American reality and politics. -- Washington Book Review [The book] really comes alive in Alexander's portraits of the people caught up in the town's unraveling...If you want to understand the despair that grips so much of this country, and the love of place that gives so many the strength to keep going, Glass House is a place to start. -- Christian Science Monitor

Author Information

Bob Souer is a full-time professional storyteller, voice actor, and AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator. He has narrated broadcast and nonbroadcast projects for corporations and ministries across North America. His voice has been heard on PBS, the History Channel, the Military Channel, and many other networks. He has also narrated radio and television programs for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, D. James Kennedy Ministries, SIM, and Compassion International. Brian Alexander is an award-winning journalist and author who has written about American culture for decades. He is a two-time finalist for the National Magazine Award. He has also been recognized by Medill School of Journalism's John Bartlow Martin Awards for public interest journalism, the Association of Health Care Journalists, and other organizations. He has been a columnist for NBC News.

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