Nuzum, Eric. Giving Up the Ghost: A Story About Friendship, 80s Rock, A Lost Scrap of Paper, and What It Means to be Haunted. New York: Dial Press, 2012.

Growing up in Canton, Ohio, Eric Nuzum was convinced his house was haunted. He’d been plagued by vivid dreams of a ghostly little girl in a blue dress: every night she would appear and shriek gibberish at him, a feeling of fear and danger clinging to her. Mysterious thudding noises from the attic didn’t seem to help, and neither did the feeling that just beyond any closed door, someone was watching him.

Enter Laura Patterson. Eric and Laura were typical Rust Belt era misfits: they hung out in abandoned miniature golf courses, made each other mix tapes and went to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Laura was the only one there for Eric when his visions of the little ghost girl landed him in a psychiatric hospital. Predictably, the friendship fell apart after high school. Laura departed for New York, where her own life fell apart and ended prematurely.

Giving Up the Ghost is part memoir, part psychic investigation. The book is written in three narratives: in the first, Nuzum traces his history of ghost girl visions; the second, his friendship with Laura. In the third narrative, an adult Nuzum, still beset with visions of Laura, sets out on a quest to find out what it means to be haunted, visiting Clinton Road, a hotbed of miscellaneous paranormal activity in northern New Jersey; the Gettysburg battlefield; the upstate New York spiritualist community of Lily Dale; the Mansfield Reformatory, and ultimately, his childhood home.

Reading Giving Up the Ghost is a bit like listening to someone talk about their dreams: they’re obviously meaningful to the teller, but they don’t necessarily make sense to you. Nuzum’s ghost girl was unsettling and Laura’s fate was tragic, but the two never really seemed to intersect in a meaningful way, and the outcome of his modern-day ghost hunt narrative is so predictable (“I don’t believe that places are haunted, but I do believe that people are haunted”) that it would’ve been better to leave it out. Plus, the spooky and forlorn landscape of 1980s Northeast Ohio begs otherwise: from the abandoned Putt-O-Links at the opening of the story, to Laura and Eric’s hangout at the gas well, to the noose found dangling beneath an overpass in Cleveland’s Flats, it’s patently clear that places do seem to be just as haunted as people.

Still, it is hard to read the 1980s narrative without feeling sucker-punched back into one’s own turbulent adolescence. Teenage Laura and Eric are breathtakingly rendered with the furious jealousies and thrills, secrets and explosive anxieties that accompany all such loner friendships, even more so since Laura died young: frozen in time, she becomes a sort of post-punk Annabel Lee. Which makes us wonder uneasily about the objects of our forgotten obsessions and where they might be today.

At its heart, Giving Up the Ghost is a strange tale with a beginning but no end, one that reminds us that life isn’t a narrative construct – life is just life, and sometimes it just ends, with no meaning or moral.

–Christine Borne

High, Steven. Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America’s Rust Belt, 1969-1984. Toronto; University of Toronto Press, 2003.

There are varying definitions of what constitutes the Rust Belt.  Some descriptions include mainly the Great Lakes region, while others include more of the mid-Atlantic states with cities such as Utica, Trenton, and Baltimore.  Either way, Ohio is firmly a part of the Rust Belt, though Cincinnati and Columbus may or may not make the cut. (Cincinnati is sometimes too South and not automobile-and-steel-manufacturing centric enough, and Columbus is often included with the Sun Belt cities, perhaps because it is the least unsuccessful city in Ohio.)

I like to think of the Rust Belt as cities that grew up around mass production (usually closely tied to the automobile) at the turn of last century.  The life of these factories, without new investment, lasted until approximately the economic downturn of the late 1970s.  Other common attributes include decrepit cities surrounded by aging suburbs, extreme racial segregation, and dramatic population loss over the last 50 years. (Basically, one would recognize the Rust Belt if one saw it.)

Stephen High’s Industrial Sunset is not a history of the Rust Belt. Rather, it is a study of the forces that converged to make the Rust Belt, beginning with the removal of large-scale manufacturing. Industrial Sunset looks at the moment the factory closed down from different angles – those of the workers, the communities, the industries, and the politicians. Interestingly, High also provides a running comparison of how things played out in the United States versus industrial Canada – or the “Golden Horseshoe” of southern Ontario.

The final two chapters focus on how the community and greater society reacted to decline. Up until this point, the comparisons between Canada and the United States did not diverge greatly. In Canada, those opposed to the closing of factories were much more successful at building consensus, to bring differing interests together to develop marginal legislation in regulating how plants shut down and compensation given to former workers.

In the United States, however, it was trickier to bring regional or national interests together, as cities and states were generally competing with each other for manufacturing jobs. Here the author discusses two events in Ohio – the (falsely) rumored relocation of Dayton’s Frigidaire operations in 1971 and post-closing local activism in Youngstown. The Frigidaire rumors eventually were able to draw enough concerns in the community to extract concessions from the union. High notes that this became a general modus operandi for future labor disputes. The Youngstown story is of local activists attempting to re-open Campbell Steel Works as a community owned industry. Though the city received much attention regarding this plan in national media, there was very little support from the international unions, state and federal government, and even local politicians.

The chapter that stands out thematically from the rest is “Back to the Garden,” which focuses on postwar factory design. High looks at articles from the trade journals and advertisements of the 1950s, which emphasized the more efficient, one-story factory that usually was built on newly developed land away from the cities and unions (in the United States). This was the general trend of postwar manufacturing expansion.  What starts out as architectural overview quickly turns into a geographic explanation of how the Rust Belt developed. In terms of the lasting mark on the social image of a region and an era, the turn of the century multi-story factory is the iconic image of the dirty, old Rust Belt city, the main ingredient in ruin porn and the basis of many loft apartment redevelopment plans.

With its narrow academic focus, I wouldn’t consider Industrial Sunset the definitive book on the Rust Belt, but it is a book I would recommend for those interested in understanding the region, and that current hard times are a direct result of the exodus of industrial jobs. I would place Industrial Sunset as a much broader Steeltown, USA, which focused on Youngstown during and after the steel industry decline of the late 1970s and early 1980s.  As with the Youngstown narrative, there is an emphasis on oral histories and media studies of the time that blend cultural history with economics. High’s biggest achievement is having a large net, which captures and synthesizes the experience of a steel worker in Hamilton, Ontario, with the tire manufacturer in Akron. In doing so, he tells the Rust Belt creation story and allows others to tell the aftermath.

–James Nickras

A version of this review originally appeared in the Ohio Book Review.

McClelland, Ted. The Third Coast: Sailors, Strippers, Fishermen, Folksingers, Long-Haired Ojibway Painters and God-Save-the-Queen Monarchists of the Great Lakes. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2008.

In The Third Coast, Chicago-based writer Ted McClelland embarks on a three-month circle tour of the Great Lakes in search of a common regional culture.

I’ve been wanting to read a book like this since I came across Barry Cunliffe’s Facing the Ocean in a bookstore in Glastonbury.Facing the Ocean posits that (archaeologically, at least) the people of the Atlantic coasts of Europe , from Ireland to Iberia, are more like each other than like their own inland countrymen. I suspected the same might be true for the people of the Great Lakes (I personally feel more in common with Buffalo and Detroit than with the rest of Ohio).

I won’t attempt to analyze McClelland’s entire book, but rather the three chapters where the Great Lakes meets the Rust Belt: Chapter 21, The Irony of Buffalo (including Buffalo and Erie, PA); Chapter 22, Ethnic Jazz (Cleveland); and Chapter 23, Black Bottom Blues (Detroit).

The Rust Belt subculture of the Great Lakes culture is summed up perfectly by McClelland’s companion on a boat trip down the Buffalo River, past the decaying remnants of long-forgotten industry:

“There’s few things that Buffalo has done perfectly. [But it has] perfectly separated the citizens from the waterfront.”

There is the same disconnect between the waterfront and the citizens in the next two waning industrial powerhouses McClelland visits. Although he acknowledges the Cuyahoga River’s role as a still-significant waterway, and in Detroit he visits the Mariners’ Church (not to mention the only floating post office in the U.S.), people in the Rust Belt don’t seem to embrace maritime culture in the same way as the fishermen and Boat Nerds of the Upper Great Lakes and Ontario. There isn’t anyone in the Rust Belt who seems to feel, as Ojibway chief Raymond Goodchild does, that there are “medicines in the water that belong to the people.”

Rather, Cleveland and Detroit are portrayed more as ethnic and “urban-eccentric.” McClelland nails Cleveland’s Rust Belt chic appeal:

This might be Cleveland’s moment…. In America’s hippest urban neighborhoods there’s nothing cooler than looking uncool. From coast to coast, alienated, countercultural twenty-three-year-olds have raided Cleveland’s closet for Penguin sport shirts, Jack Nicklaus golf pants, chunky glasses, and granny skirts…. They think bowling and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer make a great night out. Cleveland’s thrift stores and alleys could become major tourist attractions.

But, he adds:

Cleveland isn’t cool enough to pick up on that. Instead, it flogs the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Detroit is less Rust Belt Chic and more a poster-child for urban decay. McClelland visits the Heidelberg Project, which aims to revivify a declining neighborhood through unconventional public art installations. The neighborhood, judging by the map, has seen the business of a bulldozer lately – a typical strategy employed by shrinking cities to reconfigure their neighborhoods to suit half the population they were originally designed for. In the chapter, McClelland encounters a mess of feathers in one of these vacant lots. A neighbor tells him that a hawk swooped down, killed a pheasant, and ate it on the spot — a sure sign that nature was starting to reclaim a once-dense urban environment.

McClelland’s book, though far from exhaustive, accomplishes the next best thing: it shows Great Lakes people as they are, in all of their unique glory. It issues no judgment and draws few conclusions (other than if you attempt a circle tour of the Great Lakes you might return with a new-found love of hockey).

McClelland’s next book, Nothin’ But Blue Skies: The Heyday, Hard Times, and Hopes of America’s Industrial Heartland, is due out in May 2013.

–Christine Borne

A version of this review originally appeared at the now-defunct Rust Belt Reader.