| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Good with Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt. By Carlo Rotella. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. x, 269 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-520-22562-7.)

By its title, Good with Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt sounds as though it might be a coffee-table book. In fact, it is a complicated, if rather diffuse, rumination on postindustrial society, the decline of rust belt cities, and the passing of a working-class culture that was made by working and that prized men who were "good with their hands." Written by Carlo Rotella, associate professor of English and director of American studies at Boston College (and author of October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature, 1998), the book consists of four long and somewhat tenuously connected chapters that in a meandering fashion examine, in turn, the world of a female boxer in Erie, Pennsylvania, Buddy Guy and the Chicago blues scene, the film The French Connection (1971) as postindustrial urban crime and urban police story, and the Brockton, Massachusetts, urban redevelopment efforts centered around the restoration of the boxer Rocky Marciano's former home.

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