Autopsy of an Engine: and Other Stories from the Cadillac Plant

I picked up this short story collection for purely personal reasons: one of its characters is based on my first cousin, John, who, like the book's other characters, spent years at Detroit's long-closed Cadillac Plant on Clark Street. By the time I finished Autopsy of an Engine, I felt fully acquainted with every character and with the joys and pains of a place where people defined themselves by the luxury cars they pumped out. But this book is not just an ode to that complicated organism known as an auto plant. It is about the satisfactions people can squeeze from routines and about the relationships they create through something as simple as sharinga home-made pound cake. It's also about Detroit, the city that created the very idea of what it meant to be middle class. Lolita Hernandez capturs all of these yearning pieces and shows you how they smelled and tasted and resounded.

Lolita Hernandez does an excellent job of capturing the feel of working in a plant. Having worked in the same place during the same period of time, the stories bring back what it was like with crystal clarity. When I heard Lolita had written this book, I was initially interested solely because I had worked at Cadillac in Detroit. I wasn't sure anyone else would be able to relate. However, Lolita's story telling gift brings everyone - familiar or not - into the heart of what it was like on Clark Street in Detroit. Although each story somehow relates to the auto industry, the relationships and life struggles depicted apply to a universally broad spectrum. Worth the time.