Rust

December 9, 2019
A female steelworker confronts extreme heat, psychological turmoil, and Trumpian culture clash in this soulful portrait of industrial life. Goldbach started working at the vast Arcelor Mitall steel plant in Cleveland in 2016 and spent three years performing dreary and dangerous jobs: sweeping up in cavernous buildings, hefting huge loads on unstable forklifts, tending giant steel coils that could crush her should they slip, donning a fire-retardant jumpsuit to rake dross out of a vat of molten zinc. She also weathered an overwhelmingly male workplace’s assumptions about female incompetence along with erratic swing shifts that frazzled her relationship and her mental health as she struggled with bipolar disorder. Her story also focuses larger social conflicts as Goldbach, a onetime anti-abortion Catholic who became a liberal feminist after she was raped in college, contends with her parents’ and coworkers’ pro-Trump sentiments and with society’s—and sometimes her own—disdain for blue-collar work. Goldbach’s evocative prose paints a Dantean vision of the mill—“the buildings, which are covered in rust and soot, have taken on the blackish-red color of congealed blood”—but she discovers in the plant’s quirky, querulous employees an ethic of empathy and solidarity that bridges ideological divides. The result is an insightful and ultimately reassuring take on America’s working class.

December 15, 2019
Ohioan Goldbach turns in a gritty memoir of working in a steel mill while wrestling with the world beyond. "Steel is the only thing that shines in the belly of the mill." The rest, writes the author, is hued in the greens and browns of dust and decay, muted and camouflaged. Appropriately, at the plant, she was just this side of anonymous, known as "#6691: Utility Worker." Still, she was assured by fellow workers that the money she would make would be the envy of Cleveland, certainly more than what she'd make as the professor she wanted to become. Of course, there were plenty of drawbacks. Her first day, she heard the horrific tale of another woman on the line torn to bits--"her body just fell apart"--by an errant cylinder on a conveyor belt. There were also dangerous forklifts and cauldrons and vats of magmatic metal. The world outside was full of terrors, as well. Goldbach endured sexual assault and the onset of bipolar disorder and battled her parents on matters of religion and politics. As a solid member of the blue-collar working class, union card in hand, she took a role as the resident liberal in the steel mill, a type so rare that her fellow workers seemed scarcely able to imagine it. Trumpian currents run deep in the mill, as she discovered, but when tragedy strikes, she learns, these "bunch of Joe Schmos" are as one: "There was no division so great that it could eclipse the unity that had been forged in the light of the mill's orange flame." The narrative sags every now and then, but one cheers for Goldbach when she's finally offered the teaching post to which she's so long aspired, entailing a massive pay cut and starting all over at the bottom, prepared to take that risk precisely because she has gained the necessary confidence on the shop floor--and saved enough to do so thanks to the decent, union-backed wages she earned. An affecting, unblinking portrait of working-class life.

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January 10, 2020

Goldbach, a writer and steelworker at the ArcelorMittal Cleveland Temper Mill in Cleveland, presents a complex, searing indictment of the present challenges facing employed and unemployed workers in the United States. Sharing her struggles with mental health issues, along with the residual psychological effects of sexual assault she endured as a college freshman, the author describes coping with the realities of poverty, and how, despite having a college degree, she came to work in a steel mill, a vestige of her hometown's blue-collar past. These concerns lend a personal perspective to the broader topics the author discusses involving health-care inadequacies, the Me Too movement, and the current divisive political climate. In the mill, Goldbach found security in a well-paid union job but also encountered a culture of persistent misogyny in the majority-male workplace. Still, her respect for such dangerous work has led her to defend its dignity from derision by mainstream society.

VERDICT This beautifully told, nuanced memoir will strike a chord with fans of J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, and pique the interest of sociology scholars.--Caren Nichter, Univ. of Tennessee at Martin

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2020
As part of a generation that grew up being told they could be anything they wanted to be, Goldbach had not imagined that her future would involve wearing a hardhat. But after an unexpected recession dimmed her prospects for the future, even as she was about to earn a graduate degree, Goldbach decided to trade her part-time work painting houses for the promise of steady income at the steel mill in her hometown of Cleveland. With the promise of a union position after six months, Goldbach lands a job in the finishing department. Under the constant threat of danger from the mill's machinery, she earns the coveted yellow hat worn by union employees by working swing shifts that push both her mental health and her relationship to the breaking point. Bringing her perspective as an outsider?both as a woman and a liberal?to this insightful account of the steel worker's lot, Goldbach displays refreshing candor and hard-earned knowledge about the issues that divide us and the work that unites us.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)