Paul Clemens’s first book, Made In Detroit (2005), was a memoir about growing up on the city’s East Side in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. It was a New York Times Notable Book. His second book, Punching Out: One Year in a Closing Auto Plant (2011), details the dismantling of a Detroit automotive factory and the lives of the people who worked there. Mr. Clemens has also written for the New York Times and its Magazine and is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. He lives in metro Detroit.
-
Punching OutOne Year in a Closing Auto PlantFrom"Settle Labor Issues"
Like the liftoff of an airliner, the stamping of auto body parts requires inhuman force, producing decibels registered by your internal organs. The presses sound, unmistakably, as if they could kill you, which they could, without much interrupting their normal functioning. You’d notice the collision more than they would.
Punching Out:One Year in a Closing Auto Plant -
Punching OutOne Year in a Closing Auto PlantFrom"Assets Formerly of Budd Company Detroit"
You didn’t need to shave, shower, brush your teeth, or wash your clothes before work; you didn’t need to worry about your beer breath, your BO, your black eye, your smoking, your burping, your farting, your constant fucking cursing. Pretty much anything your body could do, you could do with impunity in the plant, which made its own sounds and smells, masking yours. The plant felt like a frat house, but of a peculiar, contradictory kind—one for men who had never set foot on a college campus.
Punching Out:One Year in a Closing Auto Plant -
Punching OutOne Year in a Closing Auto PlantFrom"Picking the Carcass"
“This”—he pointed to the boring mill’s base—“is the last machine tool in this shop.” He looked around the nearly empty plant. “Hundreds, thousands of industrial buildings are for sale in metro Detroit,” he said. “What does that tell you about the future of the middle class?”
Punching Out:One Year in a Closing Auto Plant
“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 [on Punching Out]
“Clemens has the street cred and old-school journalism chops to deliver a first-rate piece of deep reportage.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune [on Punching Out]
“Excellent. . . . A funny and moving memoir, it is one of the frankest accounts of race relations in America in recent years.” —The New York Times Book Review [on Made in Detroit]
Selected Works
“Mr. Clemens weaves history, economics, politics, past and present, all into a strong, forward moving narrative,” wrote the Whiting Selection Committee on Punching Out. “This is a subject that the world has largely ignored – the world of work, the lives of people who work with their hands and live from paycheck to paycheck.”