Amy Goldstein

Author of Janesville, the book in Kyle’s library chronicling a Wisconsin town after its GM plant closure. Her ProPublica-rooted reporting documents the failed retraining experiment around Janesville: laid-off workers who went back to school at Blackhawk fared worse on employment and pay than those who didn’t, despite the bipartisan “Retraining gospel” embraced by Paul Ryan and Obama alike. The book also tracks the town’s City Building attempts to reinvent its economy (Forward Janesville, Rock County 5.0) and the middle-class GM families tumbling out of the middle class as $28/hour wages disappeared.

Context: Amy Goldstein is a Pulitzer Prize-winning staff writer at The Washington Post; Janesville: An American Story won the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year.

Where this appears

• Janesville — author of the book; her reporting on the failed retraining experiment is its central empirical finding.