Boxing - General & Miscellaneous, Urban Sociology - United States, Social Change, Mystery & Crime Films, 20th Century American History - Social Aspects - Post World War II, Landscape Architecture, Social Sciences - General & Miscellaneous

Good with Their Hands

Name: Good with Their Hands
Author: Carlo Rotella
ISBN: 9780520225626

by Carlo Rotella

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Overview

This eloquent, streetwise book is a paean to America's Rust Belt and a compelling exploration of four milieus caught up in a great transformation of city life. With loving attention to detail and a fine sense of historical context, Carlo Rotella explores women's boxing in Erie, Pennsylvania; Buddy Guy and the blues scene in Chicago; police work and crime stories in New York City, especially as they converged in the making of the movie The French Connection; and attempts at urban renewal in the classic mill city of Brockton, Massachusetts. Navigating through accrued layers of cultural, economic, and personal history, Rotella shows how stories of city life can be found in a boxing match, a guitar solo, a chase scene in a movie, or a landscape. The stories he tells dramatize the coming of the postindustrial era in places once defined by their factories, a sweeping set of changes that has remade the form and meaning of American urbanism.
A native of the Rust Belt whose own life resonates with these stories, Rotella has gone to the home turfs of his characters, hanging out in boxing gyms and blues clubs, riding along with cops and moviemakers, discussing the future of Brockton with a visionary artist and a pitbull-fancying janitor who both plan to save the city's soul. These people make culture with their hands, and hands become an expressive metaphor for Rotella as he traces the links between their individual talents and the urban scenes in which they flourish. His writing elegantly connects what happens on the street to the larger story of urban transformation, especially the shift from a way of life that demanded individuals be "good with their hands" to one that depends on the intellectual and social skills fostered by formal education and service work.
Strong feelings emerge in this book about what has been lost and gained in the long, slow aging-out of the industrial city. But Rotella's journey through the streets has its ultimate reward in discovering deep-rooted instances of what he calls "truth and beauty in the Rust Belt."

About the Author, Carlo Rotella

Carlo Rotella is Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Boston College. He is author of October Cities (California, 1998) and a regular contributor to the Washington Post Magazine. His essays have appeared in The American Scholar, DoubleTake, and Harper's, and his work is included in Best American Essays 2001.

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Editorials

William Finnegan

This is a brilliant study, warm and frequently thrilling, of an inspired combination of subjects. Postindustrial American urban culture has found its great poet-theorist in Carlo Rotella.

Nick Salvatore

In the hands of others, we have learned much about the process of deindustrialization. Rotella powerfully brings the reader to the core of these socio-economic transitions in a manner that is almost palpable in its ability to connect the reader to any one of his subjects. Rotella held me, taught me, opened my eyes to an appreciation of new ways of seeing. The writing is electric, the broader conceptual framework is rich and complex, and his touch is deft throughout the book.

San Francisco Chronicle

. . . Rotella combines a scholar's rigorous sense of the past with an urban journalist's street wisdom.

Chicago Tribune

Carlo Rotella might or might not be good with his hands, but to borrow Lyle Lovett's phrase, he has 'lights in his fingers.' Rotella has written a well-crafted book a meditation, really on the fate of industrial culture in a postindustrial age.

Kirkus Reviews

Original, engrossing discussion of emerging class, race, and gender transformations in post-industrial urban America. Rotella (English/Boston Coll.) utilizes unorthodox structure and focus to good effect here; this consists of long essays on four unique urban environments and a particular subculture within each, creating a greater portrait of American cities on the cusp of change. He is sympathetic to the information-age dilemmas of the working class, writing about "sure-handed characters who . . . make culture, a form of work in itself." He utilizes this idea of cultural production to explore the historical environments enveloping his central figures. In Erie, Pennsylvania, he writes about the ascent of Liz McGonigal, a "compact and graceful" champion in amateur woman's boxing, exploring both this sport's strange collision of aggressive athleticism and sexual archetypes and the Erie boxing scene's connection to the town's hard-bitten industrial tradition (itself down but not out). The most engaging section focuses on Chicago guitarist Buddy Guy, who in his 50-year career has witnessed and profited from the blues' transformation from an entertainment of and for the city's African-American South Side into a valued tool of civic boosterism consumed by mostly white blues-rock enthusiasts. Rotella's most unusual ideas develop in considering two eccentric New York City detectives whose work during the "urban crisis" (c. 1965-70) influenced The French Connection and numerous other films and TV shows, essentially creating the post-1970 cultural idea of crime and the underclass. Equally thought-provoking is his closing chapter on the clash in Brockton, Massachusetts, between landscape artistPatricia Johanson, who purchased native son Rocky Marciano's decaying house as part of a project to honor him, and the city's political establishment, which cooled on Johanson's proposal for reasons including their wish to attract high-tech investment. Although Rotella sometimes reverts to the abstracted terminology of cultural-studies journals, serious readers will appreciate his enthusiasm, sharp observations, and the overall narrative's meandering wit. Powerful exploration of underexamined relationships between labor, culture, and the urban future.