The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt - Softcover

Giffels, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1451692749 ISBN 13: 9781451692747

Publisher: Scribner, 2014

Synopsis

Award-winning author and journalist David Giffels explores the meaning of identity and place, hamburgers, hard work, and basketball in this collection of wry, irreverent essays reflecting on the many aspects of Midwestern culture and life from an insider’s perspective.

In The Hard Way on Purpose, David Giffels takes us on an insider’s journey through the wreckage and resurgence of America’s Rust Belt. A native who never knew the good times, yet never abandoned his hometown of Akron, Giffels plumbs the touchstones and idiosyncrasies of a region where industry has fallen, bowling is a legitimate profession, bizarre weather is the norm, rock ’n’ roll is desperate, thrift store culture thrives, and sports is heartbreak. Intelligent, humorous, and warm, Giffels’s linked essays are about coming of age in the Midwest and about the stubborn, optimistic, and resourceful people who prevail there.

About this title

About the Author

David Giffels is the author of The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches From the Rust Belt, nominated for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, the memoir All the Way Home, winner of the Ohioana Book Award, and Furnishing Eternity. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic.com, Parade, the Wall Street Journal, Esquire.com, Grantland.com, Redbook, and many other publications. He also was a writer for the MTV series Beavis and Butt-Head. He is an associate professor of English at the University of Akron, where he teaches creative nonfiction in the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Program.

Reviews

“Give us something to root for,” Akron, Ohio, writer and professor Giffels says near the beginning of this collection of personal essays about his embattled home state. Ohio once was home to manufacturing plants, industry, prosperity. That began to change in the 1960s, when factories began to close, and the dismantling of the state—and of Akron specifically—continues to this day. And it’s not just a figurative dismantling: one of the most moving essays here describes the author’s thoughts as he watched an old Firestone smokestack being literally dismantled, brick by brick, on a summer’s day. Giffels’ essays put a human face on daily life in today’s Ohio, while reminding readers of all the things Ohio has given the world: from the Converse Chuck Taylor sneaker to rockers Devo and Chrissie Hynde, to the hamburger (well, probably not, but Ohio’s claim to the burger makes a heck of a good story). An interesting and occasionally moving portrait of a place that, despite its decades-long downward slide, remains, for many, a pretty good place to live. --David Pitt

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1451692749
• ISBN 13: 9781451692747
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256