The Anchor Hocking Glass Company, once the world’s largest maker of glass tableware, was the base on which Lancaster’s society was built. As Glass House unfolds, bankruptcy looms. With access to the company and its leaders, and Lancaster’s citizens, Alexander shows how financial engineering took hold in the 1980s, accelerated in the 21st Century, and wrecked the company. We follow CEO Sam Solomon, an African-American leading the nearly all-white town’s biggest private employer, as he tries to rescue the company from the New York private equity firm that hired him. Meanwhile, Alexander goes behind the scenes, entwined with the lives of residents as they wrestle with heroin, politics, high-interest lenders, low wage jobs, technology, and the new demands of American life: people like Brian Gossett, the fourth generation to work at Anchor Hocking; Joe Piccolo, first-time director of the annual music festival who discovers the town relies on him, and it, for salvation; Jason Roach, who police believed may have been Lancaster’s biggest drug dealer; and Eric Brown, a local football hero-turned-cop who comes to realize that he can never arrest Lancaster’s real problems.
Great Book – You will be smarter after you read it! This was an outstanding book. I decided to buy it after hearing about it on NPR. What I found fascinating about the book that details the typical Midwestern town in decline as the good manufacturing jobs have disappeared is that the jobs are not disappearing for the reasons one might expect. The way the author details how it was greedy private equity / hedge fund guys and not unions, taxes, health care costs, imports from Mexico and China, free trade, etc… that brought its downfall. We have…
A very well researched book about an interesting history BUT marred by liberal dogma, and meandering stories of drug addicts A very well researched story about the fall of of a once great America company and the decline of the town it helped build. If the author had stopped there, I would have gave this book five stars. Instead he offers his opinion, with scant evidence, that everything was caused by Ronald Reagan. His tortured logic goes like this: Milton Friedman and his free markets led to Ronald Reagan, led to Carl Icahn and Corporate Take-overs, which killed companies, broke unions, and finally led to drugs, gun…
Newell, the plunderers Living in Ohio in a small college town being affected by heroin distribution and amazingly increased numbers of overdoses, this book resonates.Â