"Insightful, engaging, and important, The Story of Reo Joe is a terrific book. Fine brings into the spotlight the sort of workers—overwhelmingly white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant male farmers—who played such a pivotal role in industrial history but who, because of their homogeneity, are largely overlooked. Fine's extraordinarily sensitive portrayal of Reo Joe makes us understand and care about the working people of Lansing. [We] see their lives as they saw them, celebrate their victories, and feel their losses."—Kevin Boyle, author of The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1968
"This superb social history illuminates the lived experience of class in towns and cities throughout the twentieth-century Midwest. Fine's attention to the bonds of manhood forged in and out of the workplace and to the power of the imagined Reo factory family offers an important new perspective on labor history."—Nancy Gabin, Purdue University
"Fine traces workers and their relationship to their community, their family, women and their bosses with a combination of scholarship and theories from...modern gender history. The result is a work that is readable, occasionally funny, and sensitive and respectful of her subjects."—Industrial Worker