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    The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt
    The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt
    The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt
    Ebook284 pages4 hours

    The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt

    By David Giffels

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Award-winning author and journalist David Giffels explores the meaning of identity and place, hamburgers, hard work, and basketball in this collection of wry, irreverent essays reflecting on the many aspects of Midwestern culture and life from an insider’s perspective.

    In The Hard Way on Purpose, David Giffels takes us on an insider’s journey through the wreckage and resurgence of America’s Rust Belt. A native who never knew the good times, yet never abandoned his hometown of Akron, Giffels plumbs the touchstones and idiosyncrasies of a region where industry has fallen, bowling is a legitimate profession, bizarre weather is the norm, rock ’n’ roll is desperate, thrift store culture thrives, and sports is heartbreak. Intelligent, humorous, and warm, Giffels’s linked essays are about coming of age in the Midwest and about the stubborn, optimistic, and resourceful people who prevail there.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateMar 18, 2014
    ISBN9781451692754
    The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt
    Author

    David Giffels

    David Giffels is the author of The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches From the Rust Belt, nominated for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, the memoir All the Way Home, winner of the Ohioana Book Award, and Furnishing Eternity. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic.com, Parade, the Wall Street Journal, Esquire.com, Grantland.com, Redbook, and many other publications. He also was a writer for the MTV series Beavis and Butt-Head. He is an associate professor of English at the University of Akron, where he teaches creative nonfiction in the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Program.

    Read more from David Giffels

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    Reviews for The Hard Way on Purpose

    4/5

    35 ratings13 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I liked the essays individually, but taken as a whole the anecdotes were oft-repeated. Perhaps something to read here and there in a pinch, as opposed to an all day couch affair.
    • 1/5
      I wanted to like this book more than I did. I found the writing insufferable and repetitive. This book had the potential to be so much more. Disappointing.
    • 5/5
      ssssss
    • 5/5
      excellent book! having spent my younger years outside of Toledo this book defined for me all the things I never knew how to put in to words about living in Ohio. incredible, I just bought the paperback version and I'm sure I will read it many more times.
    • 5/5
      tare
    • 2/5

      Marvelous
    • 5/5
      Great
    • 4/5
      Its excellent
    • 5/5
      Its interesting
    • 4/5

      Fabulous...!!
    • 3/5
      As a scion of the rust belt, I thought this would be an fun little death march down memory lane- unfortunately I am from the wrong part of the Rust belt as far as Mr GIffles is concerned... I liked his writing, and his general thesis that the rustbelt has a particular personality type associated with it, but changing the title to "dispatches from Akron, OH" would have been a bit more honest.
    • 4/5
      Reading "The Hard Way on Purpose" is like exploring a place I know, but haven't yet mastered. I grew up in a town 10 miles from Akron, and almost 10 years ago adopted the Rubber City as my home. As Giffels writes, people describe places here by what they used to be. These places I know but don't know come to life in what they were, how they fell into ruin, and what they have since been reborn as the city picks itself up from its bootstraps.

      More than anything, "The Hard Way on Purpose" is about what it means to stay in a place others have deemed "a good place to be from." This collection of essays is part memoir and part treatise on the cultural identity of the Rust Belt. For those who grew up in this region where manufacturing once ruled, Giffels writes, we understand the world through constant hope and loss.

      In the end, when someone asks why anyone would stay here. The answer is because it's home.
    • 3/5
      I think you have to be at least from Ohio to really enjoy this book. It seems to be more about the author growing up than Akron Ohio itself, and while the author can write by half way through the book I just didn't care about what he was writing anymore. I get it Ohio is grey and depressing in winter, all major businesses have moved away, and their professional sports teams have sucked in the past and will continue to suck in the future.My advice to the author- move!

    Book preview

    The Hard Way on Purpose - David Giffels

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