BEST BOOKS OF 2024
"Fifty years after Studs Terkel’s Working, a historian delivers a comprehensive sequel for the age of late-stage capitalism. [...] These often-fascinating anecdotes are a rich portrait of modern-day economic anxiety and social change."
Working in the 21st Century
From nurses and teachers to wildland firefighters and funeral directors—an intimate, honest, and illuminating collection of interviews that reveal what it’s like to work in America at this historic and volatile moment in time.
Mark Larson sits down with more than one hundred workers from across the socioeconomic spectrum as they share their experiences with work and what it has meant in their lives—the good, the bad, the mundane, and the profound. Doulas, firefighters, chefs, hairstylists, executives, actors, stay-at-home parents, and so many more talk about what they do all day and how it aligns (or doesn't) with what they want to be doing with their lives.
The pandemic, the ensuing “Great Resignation,” and the current reckonings with racial justice are among the forces that are now upending and reshaping our longstanding relationships with work. Larson’s interviews display how these forces collide in the lives of average Americans as they tell their own stories with passion, heartbreak, and, ultimately, hope.
Working in the 21st Century asks why we show up—or don’t—to the jobs we’ve chosen, and how the upheaval of the past few years has changed how we perceive the work we do. It will be released to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Studs Terkel's 1974 classic Working.
blurbs
Presented together in one thick volume, these often-fascinating anecdotes are a rich portrait of modern-day economic anxiety and social change.
We’ve needed this book for a long time. Much has changed in the fifty years since Studs Terkel published Working, and Mark Larson explores the new world of work with the same sensitivity and patience, the same ability to lead people to revelations both bright and tragic about what their work is, what it means to them, and to all of us.”
Thomas Dyja,
author,The Third Coast
Written in the tradition of Chicago great Studs Terkel, Working in the 21st Century is an expansive and impressive work of oral history that explores how Americans are struggling to make a living in a new era of upheaval. Coming to us on the fiftieth anniversary of Terkel’s Working, Larson’s Working in the 21st Century is sure to be a more than worthy followup and a modern classic in the form.
A colorful mosaic that spotlights our jobs, how we do them, and what they mean.
Mark Larson's superb and robust oral storytelling brings new light to the life of work. His book explores the intricacies of people working in these 21st Century times and shows that while work has been transformed, it is also becoming more relevant and powerful than ever.
Laura Washington
Larson succeeds in his quest to
discover how contemporary workers define themselves and their lives, and his subjects bring life to the masses of everyday workers.
Booklist
Larson’s book is a hopeful warning, letting us see what we have done to each other and our planet, needlessly, and the cost we are paying, as a community and as individuals. [...] Larson asks more than what do you do, he asks how it makes his subjects feel, how it shaped their world, and what it all means when it is over.