Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression - Hardcover

"Evokes the Depression-era collaboration of Walker Evans and James Agee." Publishers Weekly 20110404 "'Someplace Like America' is unrelenting prose... There's something doggedly heroic in this commitment to one of journalism's least glamorous, least remunerative subjects." -- George Packer New Yorker 20130429 "Deserves high praise ... Undeniable relevance to today's American experience." Foreword 20110610 "Maharidge's straightforward-but-impassioned prose and Williamson's gritty black-and white photographs make you angry. They're an indictment." -- Joseph B. Atkins, University of Mississippi American Studies 20130414

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.