Reckoning with Reagan : America and Its President in the 1980s

Mollie's Job is an absorbing and affecting narrative history that traces the postwar migration of one factory job as it passes from the cradle of American industry, Paterson, New Jersey, to rural Mississippi during the turmoil of the civil rights movement to the burgeoning border city of Matamoros, Mexico.

This fascinating account follows the intersecting lives and fates of three women -- Mollie James in Paterson, Dorothy Carter in Mississippi, and Balbina Duque in Matamoros, all of whom work the same job as it winds its way south. Mollie's Job is the story of North American labor and capital during the latter half of the twentieth century and the dawn of the twenty-first. The story of these women, their company, and their communities provides an ideal prism through which William Adler explores the larger issues at the heart of the book: the decline of unions and the middle class, the growing gap between rich and poor, public policy that rewards companies for transferring U.S. jobs abroad, the ways in which "free trade" undermines stable businesses and communities, and how the global economy exploits workers on both sides of the border.

At once a social and industrial history; a moving, personal narrative; and a powerful indictment of free trade at any cost, Mollie's Job puts a human face on the political and market forces shaping the world at the dawn of the new millennium and skillfully frames the current debate raging over future trade agreements.

If the hidden horrors and valor of combat persist at all in the public mind, it is because of those writers who watched it and recorded it in the faith that war is too important to be confined to the private memories of the warriors. Above all these writers, Ernie Pyle towered as a giant. Through his words and his compassion, Americans everywhere gleaned their understanding of what they came to call "The Good War."

Pyle walked a troubled path to fame. Though insecure and anxious, he created a carefree and kindly public image in his popular prewar column -- all the while struggling with inner demons and a tortured marriage. War, in fact, offered Pyle an escape hatch from his own personal hell.

It also offered him a subject precisely suited to his talent -- a shrewd understanding of human nature, an unmatched eye for detail, a profound capacity to identify with the suffering soldiers whom he adopted as his own, and a plain yet poetic style reminiscent of Mark Twain and Will Rogers. These he brought to bear on the Battle of Britain and all the great American campaigns of the war -- North Africa, Sicily, Italy, D-Day and Normandy, the liberation of Paris, and finally Okinawa, where he felt compelled to go because of his enormous public stature despite premonitions of death.