Punching Out One Year in a Closing Auto Plant

An elegy-angry, funny, and powerfully detailed-about the slow death of a Detroit auto plant and an American way of life. How does a country dismantle a century’s worth of its industrial heritage? To answer that question, Paul Clemens investigates the 2006 closing of one of America’s most potent symbols: a Detroit auto plant. Prior to its closing, the Budd Company stamping plant on Detroit’s East Side, built in 1919, was one of the oldest active auto plants in America’s foremost industrial city-one whose history includes the nation’s proudest moments and those of its working class. Its closing also reflects the character of the country in a new era-the sad, brutal process of picking it apart and sending it, piece by piece, to the countries that now have use for its machines. Punching Outis an up-close report, at once tender and angry, from the meanest, sharpest edge of America’s deindustrializa tion, and a lament for a working-class culture that once defined a prosperous America-and that is now on the verge of eco nomic extinction.

PAUL CLEMENS was born in 1973 and raised on Detroit’s East Side. His work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine. His book Made in Detroit (Doubleday, 2005) was a 2005 New York Times Book Review Notable Book. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Writers' Award.