Strong as an ox. That’s you: a regular superhero, able to perform tall tasks in a single bound, powerful in both mind and body. Like a rock. Concrete. Granite. You’re like an I-beam holding up a 20-story building, unbending in the wind.
Until, as in the new memoir, “Rust” by Eliese Colette Goldbach, everything buckles and busts.
At age 9, Goldbach says she wanted to be a nun.
Her Catholic faith strong and unwavering, Goldbach searched for a sign that her childlike mind could interpret as positive. Later, she harbored the dream as she sought higher education at a Catholic college, but rape and a mental illness completely altered her path and her life.
By almost 30 years old, she was broke and tired of a mouse-infested apartment, shabby furniture and a junk car, so when she heard that the steel mill in her hometown of Cleveland was hiring, she applied.
To her surprise, she got a job.
She’d always been curious about how everything worked, and there was a lot to learn inside the factory, of which she’d grown up in the shadow. It started with the language of the place, where all new employees were Orange Hats and where calling a golf cart anything but a “buggy” got one ridiculed.
“Rust: A Memoir of Steel and Grit”
by Eliese Colette Goldbach
c.2020, Flatiron Books
$27.99
320 pages
It progressed through an assignment at the plant that everybody referred to as the “Country Club,” to a shift in the dangerous department called “Hot Dip” and back. It allowed Goldbach to buy a new car and new furniture and to rent a better apartment, but the swing shifts exacerbated her illness and she grew to hate the person she was when she got off work. That messed with a relationship that she thought was secure.
And yet, the job taught her she was strong as the steel she helped make, as were Cleveland and the folks Goldbach worked with. Steel might not be the sexiest product ever made but, like people, it holds up under pressure.
Your days, as you are reading this, are likely catawampus. You want a business book, or maybe a memoir, or maybe something health-related. You get all three inside “Rust.”
On the business side, the author gives readers an insider’s look at steel-making – not only the actual product, but what it’s like on the factory floor and in the break rooms. This includes joys and frustrations, and giving readers a fly-on-the-wall feeling is eye-opening, as well as instructive.
Goldbach also offers insight to Rust Belt politics and why the last election turned out as it did, in words and sentiments that lap at vivid passages describing what it’s like to live with bi-polar disorder while under pressure at a new job.
If you think reading about standing over a silo of 850-degree molten metal is hair-raising, yeah, keep going...
This is a dusty book, a story like iron, it’s not always nice but it’s perfect. If you’re looking for something entirely different this week, “Rust” should be a strong contender.
Terri Schlichenmeyer’s reviews of business books are read in more than 260 publications in the U.S. and Canada.