Good with Their Hands

Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt

Author: Carlo Rotella
ISBN: 9780520225626

This eloquent, streetwise book is a paean to America's Rust Belt and a compelling exploration of four milieus caught up in a great transformation of city life. With loving attention to detail and a fine sense of historical context, Carlo Rotella explores women's boxing in Erie, Pennsylvania; Buddy Guy and the blues scene in Chicago; police work and crime stories in New York City, especially as they converged in the making of the movie The French Connection; and attempts at urban renewal in the classic mill city of Brockton, Massachusetts. Navigating through accrued layers of cultural, economic, and personal history, Rotella shows how stories of city life can be found in a boxing match, a guitar solo, a chase scene in a movie, or a landscape. The stories he tells dramatize the coming of the postindustrial era in places once defined by their factories, a sweeping set of changes that has remade the form and meaning of American urbanism. A native of the Rust Belt whose own life resonates

Publisher: University of California Press
Publish Date: 2002

Subjects: History / United States / General, Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural & Social

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Cross-Cultural Center (Location: Arts (ARTS))