Bad Jobs And Poor Decisions: Dispatches From The Working Class
by J. R. Helton /
2018 / English / PDF
211.5 MB Download
Weaving the brackish humor of Chuck Palahniuk with the empathy of
Barbara Ehrenreich, J. R. Helton brings to life an obscured
underside of the American psyche in this unflinching account of
life inside the working class of Texas in the 1980s. We first meet
Helton as a struggling writer succumbing to the bleak reality of
what it means to support himself and a wife. That despair is
transformed into resilience as Helton insightfully narrates his
wayward years, enduring hateful employers and mind-numbing manual
labor. Along the way, he introduces us to the real people toiling
beneath the saccharine veneer of wealth that was the Reagan years:
the ambitious and the lazy, the potheads and racists-as well as
Vietnam vets too shaken to hold a paintbrush, deadbeat fathers
straining to pay child support, and the casual murderer. Raw and
moving, Bad Jobs and Poor Decisions captures a microcosm of
tattered America that straddles that dangerous line between ruin
and redemption.
Weaving the brackish humor of Chuck Palahniuk with the empathy of
Barbara Ehrenreich, J. R. Helton brings to life an obscured
underside of the American psyche in this unflinching account of
life inside the working class of Texas in the 1980s. We first meet
Helton as a struggling writer succumbing to the bleak reality of
what it means to support himself and a wife. That despair is
transformed into resilience as Helton insightfully narrates his
wayward years, enduring hateful employers and mind-numbing manual
labor. Along the way, he introduces us to the real people toiling
beneath the saccharine veneer of wealth that was the Reagan years:
the ambitious and the lazy, the potheads and racists-as well as
Vietnam vets too shaken to hold a paintbrush, deadbeat fathers
straining to pay child support, and the casual murderer. Raw and
moving, Bad Jobs and Poor Decisions captures a microcosm of
tattered America that straddles that dangerous line between ruin
and redemption.