I own a "Say Nice Things About Detroit" T-shirt -- colored gray, appropriately enough. It plaintively asks us to remember, please, that the city needs our help. The Motor City, which once brought to mind Chevy muscle cars and Stevie Wonder, now makes many think of rust, racial animosity, and murder, when they think of it at all. Paul Clemens, the author of Punching Out: One Year in a Closing Auto Plant, would say that we can't afford to ignore his city much longer. What's bad for GM is bad for the country, and the deindustrialization that has been taking place in Detroit and elsewhere is beginning to have deep and unpleasant ramifications for tens of millions of people.

For Clemens, it's personal. He had deep roots in the neighborhood around the now-defunct Budd Company stamping plant, a supplier of auto body parts to all the major car manufacturers. When he read in 2006 that "Budd's" would close, he set out to find out what that really meant. After the pink slips, he spent a year watching the massive steel presses be disassembled, loaded onto trucks, and shipped to China and Brazil, or melted for scrap. He follows one press, which once produced parts for a nearby Chrysler plant, as it is trucked and reassembled in Mexico -- where it now stamps parts for Chrysler.

Clemens is a wonderful writer who shows rather than tells, introducing us to the motley crew of "riggers," security guards, and truckers who empty the plant until it becomes one more exhausted hulk on the Detroit skyline. We taste the gritty dust, just as we feel the marshmallowy softness of the rubber boots propped too close to a steel barrel, burning oil-soaked floor tiles to keep out the Detroit winter. It's clear that we are watching workers who are disassembling their own, and others', American dreams.

In a way, this is a companion piece to Clemens' 2006 memoir Made In Detroit, which chronicled what it meant to grow up white and Catholic in the rapidly changing Detroit of the 1970s and 1980s. That book, perhaps the most honest discussion of race by a white person that I've ever read, focused on people and their passions. It is also a tale of loss, as people watch a definition of "home" disappear.

In the current election cycle, there have been speeches from both parties about what it means to support manufacturing and "bring America back." Meanwhile, the trucks continue to disappear down I-75, day by day, carrying away the plants and equipment that made America, piece by piece. There's a lot of blame to go around, though Punching Out isn't an attempt to assign responsibility. It's merely a chance to let the rest of us understand a little bit more about all we're really losing.