Punching Out: One Year in a Closing Auto Plant

An elegyangry, funny, and powerfully detailedabout the slow death of a Detroit auto plant and an American way of life.

How does a country dismantle a centurys worth of its industrial heritage? To answer that question, Paul Clemens investigates the 2006 closing of one of Americas most potent symbols: a Detroit auto plant. Prior to its closing, the Budd Company stamping plant on Detroits East Side, built in 1919, was one of the oldest active auto plants in Americas foremost industrial cityone whose history includes the nations proudest moments and those of its working class. Its closing also reflects the character of the country in a new erathe sad, brutal process of picking it apart and sending it, piece by piece, to the countries that now have use for its machines.

Punching Out is an up-close report, at once tender and angry, from the meanest, sharpest edge of Americas deindustrialization, and a lament for a working-class culture that once defined a prosperous Americaand that is now on the verge of economic extinction.