Deadhead Drops Out of Economy, Tunes Into Scofflaw Nation: Books [View all]
The hard-luck stories in Barbara Garson’s “Down the Up Escalator: How the 99 Percent Live in the Great Recession” fall into two sections: people who have lost their jobs and people who have lost their homes.
Somehow, though, it’s not a gloomy book (at least not on the surface). Garson writes less about the terrible things that have happened to Americans since the crash than about the resigned/resourceful ways they’re coping.
Take Michael, a young Indiana Deadhead who has settled with such easygoing hopelessness into the new economy that he’s given up even looking for a job he might advance in.
His father works a miserable 50-to-60-hour week as a supervisor at the distribution center of a big-box retailer that, after 35 years, is trying to force him out so it can hire a younger, cheaper replacement.
“I’m not going to live that way,” Michael tells Garson. It makes her think about acquaintances from her own generation who made the choice to drop out.
MORE...
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-04-29/deadhead-drops-out-of-economy-tunes-into-scofflaw-nation-books
= new reply since forum marked as read