Punching Out

Praise

“Rewarding. . . . [Clemens] is a lovely, mournful observer of Detroit’s people. . . . [Punching Out] is a lament for a dying city and a dying way of being a man in America.”  —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
 
“Clemens . . . paints the definitive portrait of a strange, resonant feature of the contemporary American landscape: the defunct factory . . . [this book] is an elegiac reminder of a scary truth lurking behind those abstract-sounding business headlines.” —Carlo Rotella, The Boston Globe
 
“Out of the painstaking job of dismantling industrial America, a story emerges. Clemens closes the book on one venerable factory, but leaves us wondering about the future of American work.”  —San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Clemens has the street cred and old-school journalism chops to deliver a first-rate piece of deep reportage.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
“Superb practitioners of immersion journalism older than Clemens include John McPhee, Gay Talese, Madeleine Blais, Susan Orlean, Walt Harrington, Mike Sager, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and Tracy Kidder. Based on Punching Out, Clemens is a worthy addition to the list and an example for journalists not just in the United States, but around the globe. His story of another closed auto factory is sadly familiar. But it has never been told this well.” —Steve Weinberg, author of Taking on The Trust