If any of you have had the chance to be in a truly modern factory, you know that it's a place that is usually gleaming and immaculate. You could eat off of the floor. Robots are hard at work, integrated with a few humans, all much quieter than you might expectThe antithesis of this, just might be the so called factories that produced the ships and armaments during WWII. In their heyday, places like the Brooklyn Navy Yard, were noisy, boisterous, busy and amazing industrial campuses, that produced the bruising machines of war. These places were the center of the lives of real flesh and blood human beings. People like the characters in Jennifer Egan’s new novel Manhattan Beach.
My conversation with Jennifer Egan:
