Brian Alexander’s Glass House belongs to a new and still fairly accidental genre: the on-the-ground Trump explainer, a nonfiction book illuminating the desperation driving white small-town Americans, as told by a native son ... Glass House reads like an odd—and oddly satisfying—fusion of George Packer’s The Unwinding and one of Michael Lewis’ real-life financial thrillers. Alexander pings back and forth between portraits of despairing and bewildered Lancastrians and the labyrinthine corporate history of Anchor Hocking ... By the end of Glass House, as Alexander works his rhetoric up to this fiery pitch, all the preceding chapters in which he carefully detailed the arcane financial engineering that enabled private-equity financiers to strip Lancaster of its hard-earned wealth and ultimately its soul pay out like gangbusters. The case he makes is damning.
Glass House is grimly fascinating history: it illustrates the real, local impact of the seemingly abstract financial deregulation of the Reagan era. But the book really comes alive in Alexander’s portraits of the people caught up in the town’s unraveling ... If you want to understand the despair that grips so much of this country, and the love of place that gives so many the strength to keep going, Glass House is a place to start.
For those still trying to fathom why the land of the free and the home of the brave opted for a crass, vituperative huckster with an unwavering fondness for alternative facts instead of the flawed oligarch Democrats served up, Brian Alexander has a story for you ... The palpable resignation, despair, frustration and anger found in Glass House was shared by many voters who abandoned the traditional party of the American worker. As much as you hope they knew what they were doing, resignation, despair, frustration and anger generally are not the basis of sound decisions.
...a devastating portrait ... Glass House, it must be said, is not an especially easy book to read. The author seems to have interviewed nearly everyone in the local phone book; trimming would have helped. He is also prone to conventional judgments about Wall Street and politics. Regarding the latter, he writes that, for instance, both Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy 'won their elections against small-government conservatives.' This mischaracterizes both Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon. But for anyone wondering why swing-state America voted against the establishment in 2016, Mr. Alexander supplies plenty of answers.
The author effectively interweaves the personal stories of those who have lived there and continued to with an analysis of Anchor Hocking and the policies that have made a few rich while reducing the many to hand-to-mouth subsistence or to prison on drug charges. A devastating and illuminating book that shows how a city and a country got where they are and how difficult it can be to reverse course.
Alexander paints a picture of a town that’s typical of many formerly thriving communities across America. Change is tough, especially with today’s societal disconnection and the 'financialization and digitalization of American life.' This is a particularly timely read for our tumultuous and divisive era.
