Good with Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt

by Carlo Rotella

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."

269 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a part in Carlo Rotella's "Good with their Hands," where he's interviewing a woman, a New Urbanist with big plans for the town of Brockton, Massachusetts. Thinking about how the city had shown levels of racial succession and antagonisms, between the Italian, Irish, and a community of black Southern transplants, the artist unveils her plan to have a long walkway where each leg of the journey will represent something about each group; Roman arches for the Italians, Gaelic influences as a nod to the Irish, a patchwork pattern on the ground in the black portion of the park as a nod to the quilts woven by slaves, which sometimes served as secret messages on the Underground Railroad. It's at this point that Rotella notes sometimes creativity, and especially the associative brand, can lead an overeager artist down a blind path.

He could have used a bit more self-awareness at this point, since his book, which shows no deficiency in style or each individual essay (except maybe the last), collapses under the weight of its free associating exuberance. The premise is solid: to examine people who live by an old-school working class ethos in a world that values other skills, and actually denigrates grit in some circumstances. His first two subjects, female boxing and Chicago Blues, gel pretty well as solo works and even cohere conceptually for the most part. His next essay, on the movie "The French Connection" is a great meditation on the seventies crime procedural as re-imagined by auteur director William Friedkin, but it's also at this point where the analogizing starts to show strain. It's in the last and final essay, on the ill-fated plans of a female Fitzcaraldo to re-purpose the house of "Brockton Blockbuster" Rocky Marciano as a museum, that the thing really goes off the rails and into the weeds (I'm not mixing metaphors, since my hypothetical train tracks abut overgrown fields of weeds) and the book, which is well-written, collapses due to conceptual overreach. At least in my opinion. That said, Rotella's a really good writer and this is just one man's view of things.

[Mark Lisac · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid writing and strong understanding. Rotella's vignettes of life among workers — both everyday ones and ones who have achieved fame and fortune — can't cover everything that's experienced by millions of people. What he does write about is of real interest; the essays illuminate both individual characters and social phenomena. It's less lurid than "Hillbilly Elegy" but more satisfying.