Research Catalog
Bad jobs and poor decisions : dispatches from the working class : a memoir
- Title
- Bad jobs and poor decisions : dispatches from the working class : a memoir / J.R. Helton.
- Author
- Helton, J. R. (John R.)
- Publication
- New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company, [2018]
Items in the Library & Off-site
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1 Item
| Status | Format | Access | Call Number | Item Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Text | Request in advance | CT275.H5667 A3 2018 | Off-site |
Holdings
Details
- Description
- 259 pages; 22 cm
- Summary
- "The unattainable quest for middle-class stability is hauntingly captured in this biting portrayal of forgotten America Weaving the brackish humor of Chuck Palahniuk with the empathy of Barbara Ehrenreich, JR 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 troubled 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 paint brush, dead-beat 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."--Provided by publisher.
- Alternative Title
- Dispatches from the working class
- Subject
- Helton, J. R
- 1900-1999
- Working class men > Texas > Biography
- Man-woman relationships > Texas
- Working class > United States > Social conditions > 20th century
- Man-woman relationships
- Manners and customs
- Working class men
- Working class > Social conditions
- BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
- SOCIAL SCIENCE / Social Classes & Economic Disparity
- Texas > Social life and customs > 20th century
- Texas
- United States
- Genre/Form
- Biographies.
- Autobiographies.
- Contents
- Prologue: 1989 -- Other people -- Halloween -- Kansas -- Sweetheart of the rodeo -- Finding the cure for cancer -- Epilogue: 1989.
- ISBN
- 9781631492877
- 163149287X
- LCCN
- 2017032065
- 99974952733
- OCLC
- ocn988282578
- 988282578
- SCSB-8949537
- Owning Institutions
- Columbia University Libraries