A Living
Working-Class Americans Talk to Their Doctor
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- 12,99 €
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- 12,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
From a leading public health expert and physician, and in the style of Studs Terkel's Working, comes an eye-opening look at what it’s like to have to work physically hard for your money in America . . .
A Living is a vivid portrait of the working lives of the patients who visit Dr. Michael Stein, a primary care doctor in urban America. What makes his patients unique is that they, by and large, do demanding manual labor. Very few have the luxury of working remotely, or seated.
Inspired by Studs Terkel’s classic Working, Stein produces an eye-opening look at what it’s like to have to work long hours at physical jobs for a paycheck in America. A Living is composed of vignettes, snap shots of people’s working lives, the dramas, disappointments and frustrations workers have with their colleagues, family co-workers, and supervisors.
And yet it also captures the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, the opportunities for initiative and self-expression that come from doing intricate work with one’s hands. Work gives Stein’s patients a sense of identity and a social environment to thrive in.
Ultimately, A Living is an extraordinarily powerful and poetic tableaux of working-class America at this moment when manual labor may be the final refuge in the new era of AI.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Boston physician Stein (The Turning Point) offers a glimpse into his working-class patients' lives in this ambitious if unfocused account. Writing that "there can be no meaningful discourse about health divorced from where people work," he relays what his patients who "work with their hands" tell him about their jobs (he got into the habit of asking workplace questions during the pandemic, Stein explains). The resulting collection of vignettes is often revealing, especially about how the negative impacts of manual jobs go beyond the purely physical. For example, a bus driver pivots from telling Stein that "by the end of the day, I got this whole-body vibration. It feels like my bones are disintegrating," to explaining that one of the worst parts of the job is racist treatment from riders. Elsewhere, a floor installer with visible wear and tear to her hands describes feeling compelled to work harder and longer as the only female employee at her company. But the vignettes can sometimes feel too brief, and often the connection between the work and the workers' health is unexplored, with descriptions of odd or unusual manual work (milking a dog's anal glands; operating an excavator via joystick), or other job-related problems like too much travel and bad coworkers, serving as the focus. Despite some fascinating moments, this feels like peeking through a window cracked only slightly open.
