Attain Not Working Published By D.W. Gibson Conveyed As Booklet

was a labour of love to do the legwork required for all these interviews, Good reading for anyone still under the delusion that people out of work "just aren't trying hard enough" to find a job.
This book is pretty hard to get though, because it supports the idea that there really are many, many people in this country preying on the weak.
Not a pretty picture of America, In the summer and early fall of, the writer DW Gibson set off on a journey across the United States, His purpose: to interview Americans who have lost their jobs in the ongoing economic disaster that has destroyed the livelihood of millions.
The result: a book that takes the pulse of the victims of todays financial crisis and delivers a prognosis combining an extraordinary mix of pathos, anger, solidarity and humor.


Together with two companions, a filmmaker and a playwright, Gibson travelled from the collapsing new economy whitebox factories of California to the rusting and derelict industrial plants of the Northeast.
Along the way, he talked to the recently unemployed of all stripes a college graduate fired from her first job after just a week at work, an HR executive dismissed after herself laying off hundreds of her colleagues,

a cleaner fired in a cafeteria during her lunch break, and a real estate executive whose first inkling that something was amiss occurred when he arrived at his office to find it abandoned.


Each of these stories is different, and the detail of how people experience the trauma of being “let go” provides a fascinating core to Not Working.
But, beyond the specifics, important general themes emerge: the range of the recession which, despite the particular vulnerabilities of people of color and the lesseducated, is impacting communities right across the country the sense of isolation and purposeless that accompanies losing ones job and the widespread feeling that the victims are somehow responsible for their fate and the inventiveness, generosity and good humor of many of those trying to rebuild lives shattered by lost income and selfrespect.


Inspired by the great oral historian Studs Terkel, whose Working dominates the canon of American social history, Not Working is a book of burning importance for America today, a critical intervention in an election year when stubbornly immovableunemployment is certain to be the central issue.
In these pages we see unemployment not as a statistic but as a real tragedy in the lives of many Americans whose compelling stories demand to be heard.


Not Working, the book, will be accompanied by a documentary film of the same name, This was a very depressing read, Each chapter has a brief description of the interviewee, followed by the interviewee's monologue about job loss, I'd recommend it to anyone who's working, including those just starting out,

It would have gotten four if not for the grammatical errors, It seemed like the authors recorded people, then used a software program to type out what each person said, correcting only glaring mistakes in the written text.
This time, I can't blame the errors on typical digitalcrappublishing I read a paper copy, Following in the spirit of Studs Terkel's "Working", this book attempts to uncover the fallout of the Great Recession through personal interviews with people around the country who have in the past several years lost their jobs.
Many of the interviewees are incredibly honest, sharing the despair, depression, and challenges they faced in coping with loss and starting new foundations.
Gibson sought to offer us a crosssection of America by profiling people from a range of professions: academics to laborers to executive assistants and draftsmen, but the formula of simply letting interviewees speak their minds/hearts without direction became tired by page.
Greater editorial discretion would've benefited the book given the redundancy of coping mechanisms/narratives/responses issued by people,

There's no silver lining in this book people took significant pay cuts, exhausted unemployment benefits, experienced separations, and selfmedicated in a variety of ways and I don't believe there needs to be one.
This is a naked chronicle of unemployment and shouldn't have a feelgood takeaway unless the unemployed are finding greater happiness in something else e.
g. , "lost my job, now pursuing my love of X which I had earlier ignored, . . ". However, despite Gibson's incredible access to people with immediate experience of unemployment, I feel he neglected the opportunity to pull together a more coherent story of the effects of job loss.
I'm not looking for an RCT to test whether unemployment benefits smooth consumption, but rather answer some broader questions: what had interviewees done to prepare themselves for the possibility of job loss How has unemployment changed their view of formal banking Are changes in living arrangements moving in with parents permanent How has unemployment shaped their friendships and their ability to trust/rely on loved ones Developing some stylized facts about these subissues would've been a welcomed contribution beyond the straight narration of circumstances and responses.


In all, a recommended read you could put down afterpages and possibly come away with a sharper understanding of the human toll of recessions, especially if you and your loved ones were relatively unaffected.
One of the better books about the changing American work scape with fascinating interviews with people of wide ranging backgrounds and work histories as they struggle to reinvent themselves.
Much longer than it needs to be, and riddled with typos and spelling errors, But it's a good, if heartbreaking, look at today's economy and the jobs that aren't coming back, Very disheartening if you, like me, are looking for a job, I found this book surprisingly fascinating, I can barely put this book down, The stories that are shared from across the country cover blue and white collar workers, men/women, young/old, diverse locales and workplaces.
I'm loving it because I am living it, Reads super quickly, really almost like an absorbing newspaper article, Basically a great read thus far, My heart goes out to everyone in the book, They are courageous to speak about what seems to be on everyone's minds these days concerning work, self worth, providing, and in these cases, not working.
Bravo, sir and company who traveled and documented these important stories, There were a lot of interesting stories in this book, but ultimately, for me, thein their own words format took away from its effectiveness.
There were a couple of times people said things I knew not to be true things about government policy and so forth and they were just repeated verbatim.
Fact checking was outside the scope of the project, I understand, but that makes these accounts no more reliable than what your neighbor would tell you in a bar.
Got this book as research for a grad school paper, Found myself reading it instead of using it for research, The people in this book are your neighbors, your family, friends, possibly you, The stories are open and truthful, Unemployment knows no demographic. This book serves as a reminder to that, Loved this book. I'm going thru similar stuff too and it's comforting to read about the trials and tribulations of others, The premise behind this book is simple: travel across America, talk to unemployed folks from all walks of life, and let them describe in their own words the day they lost their jobs.
What emerges from these stories is both heartbreaking and oddly reassuring, a reminder to all who have been downsized that "you are not alone.
" Many themes emerge from these stories: in a struggling economy, seniority and job loyalty matter little, age discrimination exists, and we no longer live in a world where you can expect to work for and retire from a single company for your entire professional career.
Several of the people Gibson interviews had been laid off not just one but several times, . One of the most remarkable aspects of Gibson's book is the surprising lack of selfpity, Although his interview subjects are brutally honest in describing the emotions that unemployment evokes, none of them linger on the question of "Why me" Instead, a strong sense of human dignity emerges as individuals strive to make sense of disappointment, and a surprising number of those interviewed describe the compassion they felt for the HR personnel and middle managers who delivered the bad news.
The economy might be struggling, but human decency lives on, DW Gibson is the author of Not Working and The Edge Becomes the Center: An Oral History of Gentrification in the Twenty First Century.
He has written for The New York Times, The New York Observer, The Daily Beast, BOMB, and Tin House, and worked on documentaries for MSNBC and AE.
The executive director of the international writers residency Writers Omi at Ledig House, he lives in New York City with his wife and their daughter.
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