Amy Goldstein, Janesville: An American Story ****

Janesville, Wisconsin was home to a General Motors assembly plant for close to a century before it closed during the 2008 recession. The book Janesville describes the impact of the plant closing on the community over the following five years.

Goldstein makes the wise decision to focus on a dozen or so personal stories rather than presenting statistics. It makes for a more compelling narrative and allows the reader to apply his or her own theories to the situation. Goldstein manages to stay fairly even-handed about the political divide.

Goldstein's major policy-type conclusion is that job re-training programs are not effective. In fact, none of the initiatives that the community undertakes are effective across the board: the division between winners and losers and between political viewpoints feels inevitable.

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore ***

Kafka on the Shore features many of the same Murakami trademarks as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: missing cats, parallel realities, Western music and popular culture, and elusive meaning. My reaction to the book was similar too; I was intrigued by the mysterious early chapters but ultimately lost track of what the story was trying to tell me.

All that was visible was the rear of the building next door. A shabby, miserable sort of building... the kind Charles Dickens cold spend ten pages describing. The clouds floating above the building were like hard clumps of dirt from a vacuum cleaner no one ever cleaned. Or maybe more like all the contradictions of the Third Industrial Revolution condensed and set afloat in the sky. Regardless, it was going to rain. (p 301)