Another Sort of Life

Spurred by boredom and maybe a touch of mid-life crisis, a political science
professor quits the security of academic life and with just the cash in his pocket,
a worn-out station wagon and a cargo of books hits the road in search of
something different.


economy and the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression. His
new colleagues include neer-do-wells, zanies, bohemians, underachievers, and
people temporarily or permanently down on their luck. He joins the new
poor an unprecedented class of downwardly mobile people for whom university
degrees, diligence, and doing everything right have lost their force and he
becomes himself a misfit who cant, or wont, hang onto a job. During his travels
he makes a catch-as-catch-can living as an adjunct professor, a field worker,
a department store clerk, a civil servant, a door-to-door salesman, a janitor, a car
washer, a day laborer, even a seller of blood his own.



This is a close-up view of the dark (and now largely neglected) side of the 1980s,
also of a subculture which lives just below the surface of middle-class American
life and which shares neither in its affluence nor its aspirations. Its a fouryear
stroll on the wrong side of the tracks, a tale reminiscent of George
Orwells Down and Out in Paris and London, yet leavened with a dash of humor.