Wrecked

This is the most thorough and complete work covering the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. If you want to know everything about this tragedy, then you need to read this book.

* Toby Marcovich, attorney for the families of Michael Armagost, Ransom Cundy, and Freddie Beecher, cr *

Over the last forty years, the United States has undergone wrenching transformations—deindustrialization, declining unionization, and rising inequality—which have coincided with increasingly dysfunctional politics. Thomas Nelson masterfully marries this narrative to that of the infamous sinking of the USS Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior in 1975. This provocative new book unites a compelling narrative of the accident and its social aftermath with a powerful call for the rebuilding the U.S. industrial base.

* Nolan McCarty, Susan Dod Professor of Politics and Public Affairs, Princeton University *

Thomas Nelson has excavated the wreckage of one of America’s greatest tragedies to help us understand where our politics have gone wrong. As this book powerfully shows us, workers across the United States have been let down in the last few decades, just as the workers on the Edmund Fitzgerald and their families were let down in 1975. Nelson urges us to learn from this tragedy and offers a compelling path to restore a true workers’ democracy in the United States. This book couldn’t be more timely.

* Jon Shelton, professor and chair of Democracy and Justice Studies, University of Wisconsin–Green Bay *

Lovers of Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ will read Wrecked to find out what actually happened to both the ship and its individual crew members. Thomas Nelson and Jerald Podair succeed in intertwining this tale with a bigger and equally heart-wrenching story: the disappearance of American manufacturing, the rusting and decline of unions, the disintegration of infrastructure and safety standards, and the abandonment of American workers.

* Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO, New Ameri