Working Hard & Making Do: Surviving in Small Town America

by Joan Smith and Margaret K. Nelson

Book Overview

The economic recovery of the 1990s brought with it a surge of new jobs, but the prospects for most working Americans improved little. Family income rose only slightly and the period witnessed a significant degradation of the quality of work as well as in what people could expect from their waged employment. In this book, Margaret K. Nelson and Joan Smith take a look inside the households of working-class Americans to consider how they are coping with...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520215753
• ISBN13: 9780520215757
• Release Date: May 1999
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 289 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

The Beckoning Country Is Revealed

As a result of hard schlorship on the part of Smith and Nelson we have a unvarnished and well researched story of what goes on behind the Norman Rockwell postcard towns here in Vermont. It is a bitter lesson that we had all better head and it is one that regional differences is repeated throughout Rural America. With the hindsight of Seattle eariler this month Smith and Nelson might have written an even more forcful tomb. However this is one book that I highly reccomend to every public policy person and citizen when considering development and what it's true costs are. Read it and weep.