In Steel Town, it's always dark. In Steel Town, it's always raining... In Steel Town, the mills blaze all day and all night, making steel and even more steel to be shipped over the Magic Mountains, down the Pitch-Black River, and far, far away. The men who work in the mills work as hard as the machines that make the steel, never stopping. But when the men go home at night, a different side of Steel Town emerges -- one filled with music and neighbors, pierogies and spaghetti, churches and front porches. This gritty yet poetic world is brought to life through Jonah Winter's lyrical, rhythmic text and Terry Widener's luscious, nocturnal illustrations, whose massive figures glow with the few lights that shine through this darkness. This is a portrait of an imaginary town derived from the very real American steel towns of the 1930s, when the sky was often black as night all day and the cavernous mills belched out fire and smoke. Here is a journey to a town that time has not forgotten, just misplaced: Steel Town.
In 1977, Stephen Shore travelled across New York state, Pennsylvania, and eastern Ohio - an area in the midst of industrial decline that would eventually be known as the Rust Belt. Shore met steelworkers who had been thrown out of work by plant closures and photographed their suddenly fragile world: deserted factories, lonely bars, dwindling high streets, and lovingly decorated homes. Across these images, a prosperous middle America is seen teetering on the precipice of disastrous decline. Hope and despair alike lurk restlessly behind the surfaces of shop fronts, domestic interiors, and the fraught expressions of those who confront Shore's 4x5" view camera. Originally commissioned as an extended photographic report for Fortune Magazine in the vein of Walker Evans, Shore's multifaceted investigation has only gained political salience in the intervening years. Shore's subjects - including workers, union leaders, and family members - had voted for Jimmy Carter the year preceding his visit; now he found them disillusioned with the new president, fated to leave behind the Democratic party and become the 'Reagan Democrats'. Through unfailingly engrossing images by one of the world's acknowledged masters, Steel Town provides an immersive portrait of a time and place whose significance to our own is ever more urgent. With a text by Helen C. Epstein, author, translator and professor of human rights and public health.--
Once the symbol of a robust steel industry and blue-collar economy, Youngstown, Ohio, and its famous Jeannette Blast Furnace have become key icons in the tragic tale of American deindustrialization. Sherry Lee Linkon and John Russo examine the inevitable tension between those discordant visions, which continue to exert great power over Steeltown's citizens as they struggle to redefine their lives. When "the Jenny" was shut down in 1978, 50,000 Youngstown workers lost their jobs, cutting the heart out of the local economy. Even as the community organized a nationally recognized effort to save the mills, the city was rocked by economic devastation, runaway crime, and mob scandal, problems that persist twenty-five years later. In the midst of these struggles the Jenny remained standing as a proud symbol of the community's glory days, still a dominant force in the construction of both individual and collective identities in Youngstown. Focusing on stories and images that both reflect and perpetuate how Youngstown understands itself as a community, Sherry Lee Linkon and John Russo have forged a historical and cultural study of the relationship between community, memory, work, and conflict. Drawing on written texts, visual images, sculptures, films, songs, and interviews with people who have lived and worked in Youngstown, the authors show the importance of memory in forming the collective identity of a place. Steeltown, U.S.A. is a richly developed portrait of a place, showing how images of the Jenny and of Youngstown have been used in national media and connecting these representations to the broader public conversation about work and place: Bruce Springsteen's song "Youngstown," the book Journey to Nowhere, and other pop culture artifacts have helped make Youngstown the symbolic epicenter of American deindustrialization. And while many people see the need to get over the past and on with the future, in rushing to erase the difficult parts of Youngstown's history they might also forget the powerful events that made the city so important, such as the struggles for economic and social justice that improved the lives of steelworkers. This multifaceted study of the meaning of work and place in one community pointedly depicts the relationships among economic development, media representations, and community life. As we see how people's faith in the value of their work dwindled away in Youngstown, their stories can help us understand not only how the meaning of work has changed but also why the changing meaning of work matters.
"I'm scared and scarred but I’ve survived" Tom Wilson was raised in the rough-and-tumble world of Hamilton—Steeltown— in the company of World War II vets, factory workers, fall-guy wrestlers and the deeply guarded secrets kept by his parents, Bunny and George. For decades Tom carved out a life for himself in shadows. He built an international music career and became a father, he battled demons and addiction, and he waited, hoping for the lies to cease and the truth to emerge. It would. And when it did, it would sweep up the St. Lawrence River to the Mohawk reserves of Quebec, on to the heights of the Manhattan skyline. With a rare gift for storytelling and an astonishing story to tell, Tom writes with unflinching honesty and extraordinary compassion about his search for the truth. It's a story about scars, about the ones that hurt us, and the ones that make us who we are. From Beautiful Scars: Even as a kid my existence as the son of Bunny and George Wilson seemed far-fetched to me. When I went over it in my head, none of it added up. The other kids on East 36th Street in Hamilton used to tell me stories of their mothers being pregnant and their newborn siblings coming home from the hospital. Nobody ever talked about Bunny's and my return from the hospital. In my mind my birth was like the nativity, only with gnarly dogs and dirty snow and a chipped picket fence and old blind people with short tempers and dim lights, ashtrays full of Export Plain cigarette butts and bottles of rum. Once, when I was about four, I asked Bunny, "How come I don't look anything like you and George? How come you are old and the other moms are young?" "There are secrets I know about you that I’ll take to my grave," she responded. And that pretty well finished that. Bunny built up a wall to protect her secrets, and as a result I built a wall to protect myself.
Steeltown captures the tragedies in a steel mill town. Follow the lives of four young friends struggling to overcome the pressures of growing up. Who will survive the perils of innocence? Do accidents become the mysteries of rumours of murder. In a steel town hidden behind the walls of a steel mill, murder is not an accident. Live the lives of four young men as they work their first summer in a steel mill of Steeltown. Times can be good, bad and ugly. You will laugh and cry for the boys. The women of Steeltown are not, innocent bystanders, they are sometimes the cause of man's turmoil. Steeltown will shock you. Quotes: A realistic account of young friendship. For two days of reading, this book flowed like a movie. A-one-of-a-kind novel, I was not disappointed, I could not put it down, wanting to read just a little further. After reading of the tragedies that occurred in Steeltown, I was afraid to seek my first summer job in a local steel plant.
No one, not even Mikhail Gorbachev, anticipated what was in store when the Soviet Union embarked in the 1980s on a radical course of long-overdue structural reform. The consequences of that momentous decision, which set in motion a transformation eventually affecting the entire postwar world order, are here chronicled from inside a previously forbidden Soviet city, Magnitogorsk. Built under Stalin and championed by him as a showcase of socialism, the city remained closed to Western scrutiny until four years ago, when Stephen Kotkin became the first American to live there in nearly half a century. An uncommonly perceptive observer, a gifted writer, and a first-rate social scientist, Kotkin offers the reader an unsurpassed portrait of daily life in the Gorbachev era. From the formation of "informal" political groups to the start-up of fledgling businesses in the new cooperative sector, from the no-holds-barred investigative reporting of a former Communist party mouthpiece to a freewheeling multicandidate election campaign, the author conveys the texture of contemporary Soviet society in the throes of an upheaval not seen since the 1930s. Magnitogorsk, a planned "garden city" in the Ural Mountains, serves as Kotkin's laboratory for observing the revolutionary changes occurring in the Soviet Union today. Dominated by a self-perpetuating Communist party machine, choked by industrial pollution, and haunted by a suppressed past, this once-proud city now faces an uncertain future, as do the more than one thousand other industrial cities throughout the Soviet Union. Kotkin made his remarkable first visit in 1987 and returned in 1989. On both occasions, steelworkers and schoolteachers, bus drivers and housewives, intellectuals and former victims of oppression—all willingly stepped forward to voice long-suppressed grievances and aspirations. Their words animate this moving narrative, the first to examine the impact and contradictions of perestroika in a single community. Like no other Soviet city, Magnitogorsk provides a window onto the desperate struggle to overcome the heavy burden of Stalin's legacy.
Volta Redonda is a Brazilian steel town founded in the 1940s by dictator Getúlio Vargas on an ex-coffee valley as a powerful symbol of Brazilian modernization. The city’s economy, and consequently its citizen’s lives, revolves around the Companha Siderurgica Nacional (CSN), the biggest industrial complex in Latin America. Although the glory days of the CSN have long passed, the company still controls life in Volta Redonda today, creating as much dispossession as wealth for the community. Brazilian Steel Town tells the story of the people tied to this ailing giant – of their fears, hopes, and everyday struggles.
Canada's award-winning crime writer takes on a transatlantic serial killer One of six book-length stories published in the Hamilton Spectator, Poison is a riveting piece of crime reporting that won a National Newspaper Award in 2004. Chronicling the life and crimes of serial murderer Sukhwinder Dhillon, who coolly dispatched two wives, two twin infants, and a friend just for insurance money, Poison details the trail that stretched from Canada to India, the work of the insurance claims investigator and the detectives who suspected wrong-doing, the forensics that sealed Dhillon's fate, and the legal twists and turns of the double murder trial that followed.
