Dale Maharidge – författare

In Someplace Like America, writer Dale Maharidge and photographer Michael S. Williamson take us to the working-class heart of America, bringing to life--through shoe leather reporting, memoir, vivid stories, stunning photographs, and thoughtful analysis--the deepening crises of poverty and homelessness. The story begins in 1980, when the authors joined forces to cover the America being ignored by the mainstream media--people living on the margins and losing their jobs as a result of deindustrialization. Since then, Maharidge and Williamson have traveled more than half a million miles to investigate the state of the working class (winning a Pulitzer Prize in the process). In Someplace Like America, they follow the lives of several families over the thirty-year span to present an intimate and devastating portrait of workers going jobless. This brilliant and essential study--begun in the trickle-down Reagan years and culminating with the recent banking catastrophe--puts a human face on today's grim economic numbers. It also illuminates the courage and resolve with which the next generation faces the future.

Sgt. Steve Maharidge, like many of his generation, hardly ever talked about the war. The only sign of it was a single black and white photograph that he pinned to the wall of his basement, where, in his spare time, he would grind steel. The picture showed Maharidge with one of his comrades---he never said who. In front of his son, Maharidge once yelled over the sound of his steel grinders at the photograph: "They said I killed him, and it wasn't my fault!" After Steve Maharidge's death, his son Dale, an adult now, began a quest to understand his father's outburst: What had happened during the battle for Okinawa, and why his father had remained haunted and all but silent about his experience and the unnamed man. In his quest for the soldier, Maharidge sought out the survivors of Love Company, men in their late 70s and 80s, many of whom had never before spoken so openly and emotionally about what they saw and experienced on Okinawa.The Battle of Okinawa of World War II began in April 1945---in the following four months, an estimated 250,000 Japanese soldiers and native Okinawans would perish, as would 12,000 American soldiers. Americans called the battle Operation Iceberg, while the Japanese called it tetsu no ame, or the rain of steel. In Bringing Mulligan Home, Maharidge delivers an affecting narrative of war and its aftermath, of fathers and sons, of the generation that survives the shell-shocked men who fought on Okinawa. In a small way, Bringing Mulligan Home fills the silence that has haunted the post-war generation. An established scholar of the American working class, Maharidge also masterfully paints a picture of the industrial working-class landscape that drove men to enlist, and the United States that awaited them upon return.

One day in the spring of 2013, a box appeared outside a fourth-floor apartment door in Brooklyn, New York. The recipient, who didn't know the sender, only knew she was supposed to bring this box to a friend, who would ferry it to another friend. This was Edward Snowden's box-printouts of documents proving that the US government had built a massive surveillance apparatus and used it to spy on its own people-and the friend on the end of this chain was filmmaker Laura Poitras.Thus the biggest national security leak of the digital era was launched via a remarkably analog network, the US Postal Service. This is just one of the odd, ironic details that emerges from the story of how Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge, two experienced journalists but security novices (and the friends who received and ferried the box) got drawn into the Snowden story as behind-the-scenes players. Their initially stumbling, increasingly paranoid, and sometimes comic efforts to help bring Snowden's leaks to light, and ultimately, to understand their significance, unfold in an engrossing narrative that includes emails and diary entries from Poitras. This is an illuminating essay on the status of transparency, privacy, and trust in the age of surveillance.

"This is a book ripped from the headlines, from Black Lives Matter to recently thriving downtowns stripped of office workers and service workers. Those catching the brunt of it all, those with the steepest hills to climb, may have been fucked at birth. But for everyone, as Maharidge observes, the feeling of safety is folly. A sharp wake-up call to heed the new Depression and to recognize the humanity of those hit hardest." —Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW “Dale Maharidge takes us coast to coast in 2020, down highways along which he first reported decades ago. His honed class awareness—unrivaled among contemporary journalists—reveals that today's confluent health, economic and social crises are the logical conclusion to generations of unvalidated, untreated despair in a wealthy nation. Forget hollow commentary from detached television news studios in New York City. Fucked at Birth is the truth.” —Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Dale Maharidge has spent his career documenting the downward spiral of the American working class. Poverty is both reality and destiny for increasing numbers of people in the 2020s and, as Maharidge discovers spray-painted inside an abandoned gas station in the California desert, it is a fate often handed down from birth.Motivated by this haunting phrase—“Fucked at Birth”—Maharidge explores the realities of being poor in America in the coming decade, as pandemic, economic crisis and social revolution up-end the country. Part raw memoir, part dogged, investigative journalism, Fucked At Birth channels the history of poverty in America to help inform the voices Maharidge encounters daily. In an unprecedented time of social activism amid economic crisis, when voices everywhere are rising up for change, Maharidge’s journey channels the spirits of George Orwell and James Agee, raising questions about class, privilege, and the very concept of “upward mobility,” while serving as a final call to action. From Sacramento to Denver, Youngstown to New York City, Fucked At Birth dares readers to see themselves in those suffering most, and to finally—after decades of refusal—recalibrate what we are going to do about it.