The Anchor Hocking Glass Company, once the world's largest maker of glass tableware, was the base on which Lancaster's society was built. As Glass House unfolds, bankruptcy looms. With access to the company and its leaders, and Lancaster's citizens, Alexander shows how financial engineering took hold in the 1980s, accelerated in the 21st Century, and wrecked the company. We follow CEO Sam Solomon, an African-American leading the nearly all-white town's biggest private employer, as he tries to rescue the company from the New York private equity firm that hired him. Meanwhile, Alexander goes behind the scenes, entwined with the lives of residents as they wrestle with heroin, politics, high-interest lenders, low wage jobs, technology, and the new demands of American life: people like Brian Gossett, the fourth generation to work at Anchor Hocking; and Eric Brown, a local football hero-turned-cop who comes to realise that he can never arrest Lancaster's real problems.
- ISBN13 9781250165770
- Publish Date 2 January 2018 (first published 14 February 2017)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 4 April 2022
- Publish Country US
- Imprint St Martin's Press
- Format Paperback
- Pages 336
- Language English