"Ex — Chicago Tribune correspondent Longworth (Global Squeeze) paints a bleak, evocative portrait of the Midwest's losing struggle with foreign competition and capitalist gigantism. It's a landscape of shuttered factories, desperate laid-off workers, family farms gobbled up by agribusiness, once great cities like Detroit and Cleveland now in ruins, small towns devolved into depopulated 'rural slums' haunted by pensioners and meth-heads. But the harshest element of the book is Longworth's own pitiless ideology of globalism. In his telling, Midwesterners are sluggish, unskilled, risk-averse mediocrities, clinging to obsolete industrial-age dreams of job security, allergic to 'change,' indifferent to education and 'totally unfit for the global age.' They are doomed because global competition is unstoppable, says Longworth, who dismisses the idea of trade barriers as simplistic nonsense purveyed by conspiracy theorists. The silver linings Longworth floats — biotechnology, proposals for regional cooperation — are meager and iffy. The Midwest's real hope, he insists, lies in a massive influx of mostly low-wage immigrant workers and in enclaves of 'the rich and brainy,' like Chicago and Ann Arbor, where the 'creative class' sells nebulous 'information solutions' to 'dropouts and Ph.D.s.' It's not the Middle West that's under siege in Longworth's telling; it's the now apparently quaint notion of a middle class." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

A "Chicago Tribune" reporter explores the new reality of life in todays heartland and reveals what these changes mean for the region and the country. Longworth addresses whats right and whats wrong in the region, and offers a prescription for how it must change--politically as well as economically--if it is to survive and prosper.

Now a fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Richard C. Longworth was formerly an award-winning foreign correspondent and senior writer at the Chicago Tribune. His previous book, Global Squeeze, was lauded by Foreign Affairs as “an engrossing study of how advanced societies grapple with the disruptive forces of global markets.” Twice a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Longworth lives in Chicago.