With a Foreword by Bruce Springsteen In Someplace Like America, writer Dale Maharidge and photographer Michael S. Williamson take us to the working-class heart of America, bringing to life-through shoe leather reporting, memoir, vivid stories, stunning photographs, and thoughtful analysis-the deepening crises of poverty and homelessness. The story begins in 1980, when the authors joined forces to cover the America being ignored by the mainstream media-people living on the margins and losing their jobs as a result of deindustrialization. Since then, Maharidge and Williamson have traveled more than half a million miles to investigate the state of the working class (winning a Pulitzer Prize in the process). In Someplace Like America, they follow the lives of several families over the thirty-year span to present an intimate and devastating portrait of workers going jobless. This brilliant and essential study-begun in the trickle-down Reagan years and culminating with the recent banking catastrophe-puts a human face on today's grim economic numbers. It also illuminates the courage and resolve with which the next generation faces the future.

Contents Foreword by Bruce Springsteen Preface to the 2013 Edition Someplace Like America: An Introduction Snapshots from the Road, 2009 Part 1 America Begins a Thirty-Year Journey to Nowhere: The 1980s 1 On Becoming a Hobo 2 Necropolis 3 New Timer 4 Home Sweet Tent 5 True Bottom Part 2 The Journey Continues: The 1990s 6 Inspiration: The Two-Way Highway 7 Waiting for an Explosion 8 When Bruce Met Jenny Part 3 A Nation Grows Hu ngrier: 2000 9 Hunger in the Homes 10 The Working Poor: Maggie and Others in Austin 11 Mr. Murray on Maggie Part 4 Updating People and Places: The Late 2000s 12 Reinduction 13 Necropolis: After the Apocalypse 14 New Timer: Finding Mr. Heisenberg Instead 15 Home Sweet Tent Home 16 Maggie: "Am I Doing the Right Thing?" 17 Maggie on Mr. Murray Part 5 America with the Lid Ripped Off: The Late 2000s 18 Search and Rescue 19 New Orleans Jazz 20 Scapegoats in the Sun 21 The Dark Experiment 22 The Big Boys 23 Anger in Suburban New Jersey Part 6 Rebuilding Ourselves, Then Taking America on a Journey to Somewhere New 24 Zen in a Crippled New Hampshire Mill Town 25 A Woman of the Soil in Kansas City 26 The Phoenix? 27 Looking Forward - and Back Coda Afterword to the 2013 Edition: Letter from the Apocalypse Acknowledgments and Credits Notes