Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams Hardcover - 2003 - 1st Edition
by Lubrano, Alfred
- Used
A groundbreaking work of journalism that identifies a new social affecting work and life. Award-winning journalist Alfred Lubrano identifies a cultural phenomenon: the conflict within individuals raised in blue-collar homes, now living white-collar lives.
Description
Details
- Title Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams
- Author Lubrano, Alfred
- Binding Hardcover
- Edition number 1st
- Edition 1
- Condition UsedGood
- Pages 256
- Volumes 1
- Language ENG
- Publisher John Wiley & Sons, Somerset, New Jersey, U.S.A.
- Date 2003-10-17
- Features Dust Cover, Index, Table of Contents
- Bookseller's Inventory # 4E5OAW001KIC
- ISBN 9780471263760 / 0471263761
- Weight 1.2 lbs (0.54 kg)
- Dimensions 9.4 x 6.5 x 1 in (23.88 x 16.51 x 2.54 cm)
- Library of Congress subjects Social mobility - United States, Social classes - United States
- Dewey Decimal Code 305.5
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First line
From the jacket flap
The son of a Brooklyn bricklayer, Lubrano came of age in a neighborhood imbued with typical working-class values like the importance of hard work, loyalty to family and community, and a healthy respect for religion. Academically gifted, he attended Columbia, and went on to achieve professional success as a reporter. But he quickly found that the lessons he had absorbed in childhood would not serve him as well as the upper-class gifts of subtlety, diplomacy, and cultural capital-leaving him strangely isolated from both his workplace peers and the world he'd left behind.
Unfamiliar with the rules of upper-class life, which serves as the model for corporate culture, the "Straddlers" (as Lubrano dubs them) find themselves ill-equipped for that buttoned-down world. Yet they share Lubrano's ambiguity, and their choices frequently challenge the philosophical and moral assumptions of working-class life.
Combining personal stories with the latest thinking from leading experts, Limbo offers a unique blend of deeply felt first-person confessional and sociological study that is both profoundly affecting and rigorously informed. Though it wholly dismisses the widely held notion that class is a dead subject in America, it avoids cynicism and easy judgment, seeking only to provide a glimpse at what lies beneath our social and cultural fabric.
The profiles here show a remarkable consistency of emotion and experience across a diverse demographic that crosses all boundaries of sex, race, and religion. Opening a long-awaited dialogue, Limbo reflects the reality of a unique class struggling with an all-American brand of cultural isolation. There is something for everyone in these honest and eloquent stories of life in our modern meritocracy.
Categories
Media reviews
Citations
- Booklist, 09/15/2003, Page 185
- Booksense '76 Jan/Feb 2004, 01/01/2004, Page 1
- Library Journal, 10/01/2003, Page 102
- Publishers Weekly, 07/28/2003, Page 85
- School Library Journal, 12/01/2003, Page 59
