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Bad Jobs and Poor Decisions

Audiobook
Nonfiction: Business
Unabridged   7.5 hour(s)
Publication date: 01/02/2018

Bad Jobs and Poor Decisions

Dispatches from the Working Class

Available from major retailers or BUY FROM AMAZON
Audio CD ISBN:9781681689821
Digital Download ISBN:9781681689838

Summary

The unattainable quest for middle-class stability is hauntingly captured in this biting portrayal of forgotten America.

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Product Description

Weaving the brackish humor of Chuck Palahniuk with the empathy of Barbara Ehrenreich, J. R. Helton brings to life an obscured underside of the American psyche in this unflinching account of life inside the working class of Texas in the 1980s. We first meet Helton as a struggling writer succumbing to the bleak reality of what it means to support himself and a wife. That despair is transformed into resilience as Helton insightfully narrates his wayward years, enduring hateful employers and mind-numbing manual labor. Along the way, he introduces us to the real people toiling beneath the saccharine veneer of wealth that was the Reagan years: the ambitious and the lazy, the potheads and racists―as well as Vietnam vets too shaken to hold a paintbrush, deadbeat fathers straining to pay child support, and the casual murderer. Raw and moving, Bad Jobs and Poor Decisions captures a microcosm of tattered America that straddles that dangerous line between ruin and redemption.

Reviews/Praise

"Bad Jobs and Poor Decisions is Helton at his best, as he recalls trudging through the lower depths working a myriad of menial jobs. With an abundance of humor, sharp observation, and a terrific ear for dialogue, he makes the bleak and tragic subject matter something to be savored."—Terry Zwigoff, director of Crumb, Louie Bluie, Ghost World, Bad Santa, and Art School Confidential

"J. R. Helton is my favorite contemporary American writer. He has a gift for writing well in plain language, and he can't seem to help but write with total honesty. I eagerly devoured Bad Jobs and Poor Decisions, as I do all his writing. Everything he puts down on paper ought to be printed and disseminated to the reading public."—R. Crumb

Author Bio

J. R. Helton has published numerous books about movies, drugs, people, and dogs. A writing teacher in Texas, his stories and poems have been featured in Mineshaft magazine, the Sun, and the Missouri Review, among others.