An elegy—angry, funny, and powerfully detailed—about the slow death of a Detroit auto plant and an American way of life. How does a country dismantle a century’s worth of its industrial heritage? To answer that question, Paul Clemens investigates the 2006 closing of one of America’s most potent symbols: a Detroit auto plant. Prior to its closing, the Budd Company stamping plant on Detroit’s East Side, built in 1919, was one of the oldest active auto plants in America’s foremost industrial city—one whose history includes the nation’s proudest moments and those of its working class. Its closing also reflects the character of the country in a new era—the sad, brutal process of picking it apart and sending it, piece by piece, to the countries that now have use for its machines. Punching Out is an up-close report, at once tender and angry, from the meanest, sharpest edge of America’s deindustrializa­tion, and a lament for a working-class culture that once defined a prosperous America—and that is now on the verge of eco­nomic extinction. “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   “Out of the painstaking job of dismantling industrial America, a story emerges. Clemens closes the book on one venerable factory, but leaves us wondering about the future of American work.”  —San Francisco Chronicle   “Clemens has the street cred and old-school journalism chops to deliver a first-rate piece of deep reportage.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune   “Superb practitioners of immersion journalism older than Clemens include John McPhee, Gay Talese, Madeleine Blais, Susan Orlean, Walt Harrington, Mike Sager, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and Tracy Kidder. Based on Punching Out , Clemens is a worthy addition to the list and an example for journalists not just in the United States, but around the globe. His story of another closed auto factory is sadly familiar. But it has never been told this well.” —Steve Weinberg, author of Taking on The Trust   PAUL CLEMENS was born in 1973 and raised on Detroit’s East Side. His work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine . His book Made in Detroit (Doubleday, 2005) was a 2005 New York Times Book Review Notable Book. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Writers' Award. WHEN JON CLARK started his newsletter, Plant Closing News, in 2003, he promised subscribers that he’d report on the specifics of 25 plant closings a month—300 per year. In 2003, he reported on 983; the next year, 1,130; the next, 1,180. When I first talked to him, in October 2007, he’d reported who, what, when, where, and why on 980 plant closings in the calendar year—“that’s so far,” he stressed, “plus an additional 250 bankruptcies.” The newsletter comes out biweekly and is “targeted to sur­plus industry service providers,” including “rebuilders, used equipment dealers, dismantlers, demolishers, remediation contractors, equipment riggers, craters, and equipment trans­port firms looking for current business opportunities, particu­larly those arising from the closing or relocating of North American industrial manufacturing plants.” Each issue begins by noting the number of closings in the United States and Canada included in the issue. For instance, the January 15, 2007, issue is headlined: “44 Companies Closing 48 Plants + 18 Bankruptcies.” These are then subdivided by industry— food processing, textile products, wood products, pulp, paper products, chemical products, rubber, plastics products, glass, cement products, metal products, electrical, electronics, other manufacturers—and again by state—“AL 2, FL 3, MI 6”— before the specifics of each closing are given. Clark recalled getting a phone call from a manager at a plant in Arkansas angry that his plant had appeared in the newsletter. Clark pointed out that the closing had already made the papers. Clark has also written Plant Closing Checklist, which includes a couple hundred questions and comments covering areas perti­nent to plant closure. “Know what one of the first things on the Plant Closing Checklist is?” Clark asked. “Tell your people what’s going on!” His memory for individual plant closings is unusually good. When we first spoke on the phone, I told him I was work­ing on a book about the closing of the Budd Detroit Automotive Plant, Stamping and Frame Division. “That was a  two- million-square- foot facility,” Clark said of the plant, whose closing had appeared in the July 15, 2006, issue of Plant Closing News. He has industrial facts and