"America has its Rust Belt, while Canada's industrial heartland on the shore of Lake Ontario is called the Golden Horseshoe. According to Canadian historian and author Steven High, that's more than a cultural quirk.  Canada and the U.S. hit the same wrenching deindustrialization in the 1970s and '80s. But while laissez faire U.S. policy let plants disappear, Canada made preservation of its industrial base a national priority.... The book comes as a new wave of plant closings crashes over the Great Lakes region; and like the previous economic blow, this one is hitting the U.S. hardest.  Does Canada hold rust-prevention lessons for the US?" 

- Fred O. Williams, Buffalo News.

"Truly there is much to learn in 'Industrial Sunset'. The era of mill closings and plant shutdowns was a devastating time for the Great Lakes states and areas of industrialized Canada. Steven analyzes the differences between the two countries' response to the closings.  Canadian unions enveloped a spirit of nationalism. The United States unions focused more on local communities.... A generation later, a young scholar from Canada captures the heart and essence of the post-industrialization era and insists there is still much to learn from those who have risen out of the dust."

- Gail White, Youngstown (Ohio) Vindicator.

"Historians of industry are still offering new insights into this dramatic decline. Among them is Steven High... High's new book, 'Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America's Rust Belt, 1969-1984... makes the case that U.S. and Canadian unions reacted differently to the threat posed by plant closings and thus achieved much different results.  High recently discussed his findings with the Free Press..." 

- John Gallagher, Detroit Free Press.

"Sometimes I feel like the world is Horton and we are the Whos down in Akron- ville.  'We are here!' we shout. 'We are here!'  I get tired of that feeling, but I also realize that sometimes it takes one extra Who-voice to carry the message.  So I'm sipping tea with honey, warming up the pipes yet again.  The shout this time comes in response to a news release that just landed on my desk, announcing a new book about the Rust Belt titled Industrial Sunset by Canadian labor historian Steven High.... Apparently the good Dr. High missed the Akron exit on his research tour....  It's inconceivable to me that someone who's researched a book on the effects of lost industry could miss the fact that Akron, after a rough spell in the 80s, underwent a methodical and successful reinvention in the '90s. ..."

-David Griffel, Editorial, Akron Beacon Journal.

"I ran into Talking Leaves, one of the few independent retail bookstores left in America, looking for a book by the poet I would be hosting in my home that evening. At the front of the store was a small card table, and stacked on it were copies of Steven High’s Industrial Sunset. John, the owner of the bookstore, told me the author had just left, and there had been some disappointment regarding publicity and the turnout. I felt a wave of guilt, because, in the midst of an otherwise extremely busy week, I had been avidly reading the very book stacked and, seemingly, abandoned there like a burning red tower of bricks. Why hadn’t even I known of the author’s visit? Since I had promised to review it, I wondered, if only I had written sooner, read fast enough, told enough people about how important this book was for me, then perhaps High would not have left so soon. But it may be, despite all of my ignorance, that the story told in its pages was one known to many Buffalonians all too well, and in such detail to cause minimal excitement in such a technical analysis as this. But I am willing to guess that, if you are under 35, or did not live in a working family closely tied to the steel, rubber, and manufacturing industries in the Midwest, you may not know why and for what reason the “Rust Belt” exists at all. You may not know what had been lost, who was behind the economic disasters, or how many workers and their families were injured because of the steady plant closures that altered the urban face of the industrial Midwest. And even if you do know some of the details, Industrial Sunset provides in a straightforward manner a story you need to read: a history of Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Cleveland, Akron, and Detroit during an era of runaway factories, rampant unemployment, and a union structure unable to mobilize effectively to save jobs and communities.  As a young man growing up near Akron, Ohio, my ability to perceive all of this turmoil came to me, mainly, through the local television news and through conversations my grandparents and parents held over our Sunday dinners. Born in 1970, it seems that, until my high school graduation in 1988, the only local history I knew was that of the vanishing rubber industry. 1970 was also the year my grandfather retired from the Firestone Tire Corporation, after being given incentives to do so when that company began its slow flight from the area.  It was during the mid-1970s that DEVO began to develop and define the New Wave sound—musically acting out the story of mankind’s devolution back into simian idiocy. A bizarre artistic reinterpretation of the economic decline well underway all around us. What was happening over in Youngstown in those years was even worse. What I would see on the TV news was much like what High describes as “the basic formula: an interview with the mayor, an interview with the spokesperson for the Ecumenical Coalition, and video footage of the closed mills” (160). Eventually, in the late 1980s, my commute from the suburbs to the University of Akron, I drove through abandoned neighborhoods fronted by closed stores and boarded-up corner bars, and along Main Street with its many deserted buildings and feeling of ruin. High’s book, is a surprising mixture of oral history, detailed summaries of jobs lost and plants closed, analyses of post-industrial factory design, and the rhetoric of community and nationality. It provides an economic, historical and political account of the relationship between the three bodies most affected by the de-industrialization of the Midwest: local communities, workers’ unions, and the manufacturing corporations. He begins this detailed portrait with firsthand accounts from workers who had lost their jobs, providing readers a sense of how it felt to know one’s livelihood would be lost, and how it hurt family, children, and their broader quality of life. We hear of these feelings of loss from workers, mostly from Buffalo, describing what it felt like to walk into the workplace for the last time."

-  Douglas Manson, Buffalo Report (Buffalo, NY).