Where The Streets Are Paved With Rust: Essays From America's Broken Heartland, Vol. 1

Literary Nonfiction. Essays. In the first installment of the two-volume collection WHERE THE STREETS ARE PAVED WITH RUST, journalist and former Obama and Clinton campaign advisor Bruce Fisher explores wealth, poverty, hopes, and illusions in America's struggling north. In these essays about Rust Belt communities, Fisher carefully but vigorously challenges. He tackles real-estate developers; knocks liberals who won't embrace metro government; excoriates conservatives for their racist code-words; nudges us to revisit the debate between Heidegger and Cassirer; and explains the brilliance of streetcars and urban wildlife, the persistence of black male workforce exclusion, the centrality of water quality, and many other issues that shape cities. Fisher takes deep dives into data, scholarship, and history--as he does nearly weekly for The Public, Western New York's leading independent weekly newspaper. Fisher's scope is broad, he wears his erudition lightly, and his work is ever about crossing boundaries--in celebration of what's to be found across the line.

"The financial decline of the middle class is the issue of our time. Bruce Fisher's WHERE THE STREETS ARE PAVED WITH RUST is a must read for anyone seriously trying to understand why it happened and how to fix it."--Ted Kaufman

"To understand Rust Belt politics, you can't do better than to read Bruce Fisher's excellent essay collection. A multi-generational son of Buffalo, Fisher brings erudition, wit, and heart to these studies, with a deep understanding of regional history, cultural geography, and public policy. Forget the Big Foot journalists suddenly traveling around interviewing random locals at the diner in the Age of Trump. Local journalist Bruce Fisher tells you everything you need to know, through the prism of Buffalo, about culture and politics in flyover country."--Catherine Tumber

Bruce Fisher is a provocative, literate essayist with a resume in national politics and policy who has made the American Great Lakes region—the Rust Belt—his focus as a researcher, activist, and writer. He's a passionate participant, which has made him a valued colleague, as when he served on President-elect Obama's Urban Policy Advisory Committee, and also an outlier in his frequent media appearances on Huffington Post TV, National Public Radio, and local network affiliates. Fisher returned to writing after advising two presidential and numerous congressional campaigns, a Supreme Court nomination fight and many Washington policy battles, and more than a dozen years in public service. The chair of the Canadian Urban Institute called his 2012 essay collection Borderland: Essays from the US-Canadian Divide "a must read for anybody concerned about the fate of Great Lakes cities on both sides of the 49th parallel," but the Buffalo News accused him of "chest-thumping" even while praising his innovative prose technique and calling the book "a compelling argument for the importance of small places."