Steeltown U.S.A.: Work and Memory in Youngstown

Sherry Lee Linkon &
John Russo

You don't really think of Youngstown as a place that would inspire a great amount of social criticism. In fact, if you're like most people, you really don't think of Youngstown much at all. It is a good thing that you are not Sherry Lee Linkon and John Russo, who do think of Youngstown as the kind of place that would inspire a great amount of social criticism. And then they went ahead and wrote Steeltown U.S.A.

It shouldn't surprise you that people writing a book about the real-world effects of deindustrialization on an American city are going to be approaching the subject from a populist viewpoint; what should surprise you is that Linkon and Russo do so in a way that even most fiction writers are incapable of: instead of moralizing at every turn, they sit back and let the story of Youngstown get the message across by itself, realizing that the stark images of the effects of deindustrialization will do all the necessary work. And it does. There's little more that will tell you "deindustrialization is bad, mmmkay?" as the plight of Youngstown from 1977 to the present day.

While it's been thirty years now since the first plant closings in Youngstown, there can be no question, in today's economy of outsourcing, that Steeltown U.S.A. is a timely bookperhaps timelier than it would have been, had it been released at any other time. It is solid, well-written scholarship, a piece of scholarly nonfiction that does its level best to read like its more popular counterpart, and succeeds more often than not. It will definitely get you thinking more, and harder, about Youngstown. One of the twenty-five best books I read in 2006.