As we turn the page toward the crisp fall season and its limitless possibilities for our students’ futures, I’ve been thinking about some titles from my own bookshelves that, over the years, have informed and inspired me about the world of work.
Whether you are a college student questing after your own vocational calling; a teacher, advisor or family member looking to help someone find their way; a concerned citizen, hoping to help create a more just and equitable American workplace; or a forty-something career-changer still thinking about what you want to be when you grow up (it’s OK, I ask myself that question all the time), here are some recommendations for your autumn reading list:
Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day, and How They Feel About What They Do by Studs Terkel (1974)
Perhaps the best-known and most wide-ranging exploration of American occupations, Studs Terkel’s Working turns 50 years old this year, but the stories told by the 133 people he interviewed for the book, ranging from newspaper delivery boys and a farmer; to a miner, a telephone operator, a professor and a sex worker; to a barber, a baseball player and a grave digger still offer amazingly candid, often poignant insights into what, and why, people do what they do for a living.
As Terkel explained in his introduction to the book: “It’s about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying. Perhaps immortality, too, is part of the quest. To be remembered was the wish, spoken and unspoken, of the heroes and heroines of this book.”
The tales those heroes and heroines tell were so compelling that they led to a 1978 Broadway musical, a 2001 sequel to the book, Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs, and, more recently, a 2023 Neflix limited series produced and hosted by Barack Obama, Working: What We Do All Day, in which the former president, echoing Terkel, observes, “A good job is one where you feel seen and valued and might have the chance to grow. When we make sure that everyone feels their work is respected…we reinforce the trust between us that makes everything in our lives possible.”
Not sure yet where you want to be working? Community college career centers are a great place to start exploring. They offer career inventories, workshops, and job fairs, as well as resources for finding an internship, writing a resume, and landing your first job
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich (2001)
Barbara Ehrenreich was a scientist with a Ph.D. in cellular immunology, a political activist with the Democratic Socialists of America, a professor and an award-winning journalist who went undercover more than 20 years ago to chronicle, in Nickel and Dimed, what it is like to try to survive on minimum wage in America.
Living in low-rent trailer homes and efficiency apartments and working alternately as a waitress and hotel housekeeper in Key West, Florida; a nursing home attendant and maid in Portland, Maine; and a hardware store and Wal Mart clerk in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Ehrenreich illustrates in stark, personal terms, the impossibility of paying for a place to live, food to eat, and adequate health care on $2.13 an hour plus tips.
One of her many searing observations:
“The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else. As Gail, one of my restaurant coworkers put it, ‘you give and you give.'”
Pro-capitalism Ehrenreich is not; and in fact, her book has been banned by a number of school districts across the country, citing vulgar language, depictions of drug use, offensive portrayals of Christianity, and promoting “economic fallacies and socialist ideas.” (So, if you’re a banned book reader, consider moving this one to the top of your list.)
If Nickel and Dimed inspires you to want to help make change for the better, community colleges offer a range of academic programs in fields like human services, political science and healthcare that can prepare you for rewarding careers in public service.
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain (2000)
Anthony Bourdain’s wild-ride memoir about the less savory aspects of learning to cook, becoming a chef, and commanding the kitchens of some of the best-known restaurants in the world absolutely blew me away when I read it more than 20 years ago.
The New York Times described his style as “a mishmash of Hunter S. Thompson, Iggy Pop and Jonathan Swift.” I would add: Bourdain inspired amateur home chefs like me the way Jimmy Buffet inspired wannabe sailors (or pirates) the world over.
Kitchen Confidential has never gone out of print and, following Bourdain’s tragic suicide in 2018, after he had transcended haute cuisine kitchens and become the celebrity star of television shows like “No Reservations” and “Parts Unknown,” it spiked to the top of non-fiction best-seller lists again.
There are certainly parts of the book that have not aged well (when the #MeToo movement caught up with celebrity chef Mario Batali in 2017, Bourdain himself expressed regret that Kitchen Confidential may have “celebrated or prolonged a culture that allowed the kind of grotesque behaviors we’re hearing about”), and Bourdain’s accounts of his own drug addiction and indebtedness are not things to aspire to.
But the best parts of Kitchen Confidential offer practical advice to diners and home chefs (don’t order fish in a restaurant on Mondays because it is probably left over from last week, and invest in the best kitchen knife you can afford); and make the high-pressure, hurly-burly jobs of high-end chefs sound like equal parts chemist, military commander and magician.
The New York Times has called programs like the Lupoli Family Culinary Institute at Northern Essex Community College, “A fast, frugal track to a cooks career,” that you can accomplish in a year or two at a fraction of the cost of private schools like the Culinary Institute of America. If Kitchen Confidential lights a fire in you to learn more, check out the community college closest to you.
A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedic’s Wild Ride to the Edge and Back by Kevin Hazzard (2016)
During his 10 years driving an ambulance in Atlanta, Georgia, first as an emergency medical technician (EMT), then a paramedic, Kevin Hazzard encountered just about everything, from heart attacks and drug overdoses to horrific traffic accidents and homicides.
Very often, it seemed, he and his mobile medic partners were administering life support or driving people to the hospital who, for one reason or another (intoxication, mental illness and bathtub slip-and-falls were leading causes), weren’t wearing very many clothes.
A Thousand Naked Strangers is Hazzard’s frequently jaw-dropping, behind-the-scenes memoir of lives saved, lives lost, and the men and women who show up on somebody’s worst day, every day, to try to make it better.
How does Hazzard (or anyone in this job) do it?
“Salvation through repetition,” Hazzard explains. “This I can do because I have done it before — it’s half-prayer, half-truth, a whisper in a hurricane of self-doubt.”
It is sometimes not an easy read (like when he arrives home from the scene of a shooting and discovers a skull fragment embedded in his boot), and certainly not for the squeamish; but for the curious who want to know what it’s like to train, both in school and on the job, and to drive an ambulance and work as a paramedic, there is no better front seat than this one.
Community colleges train 85% of the nation’s first responders, including police, firefighters and EMTs, and there is probably a program within half an hour or so of where you live. Northern Essex is proud to offer both EMT and paramedic technology training, as well as one of the largest and most diverse police academies in Massachusetts.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty (2014)
If you opt for a degree in medieval history, but aren’t interested in writing and teaching about the Middle Ages after college, what’s next?
For Caitlin Doughty, who had been fascinated with death and dying since she was a little girl but had her fill of Hieronymus Bosch paintings depicting the afterlife, it was the retort at Westwind Cremation & Burial in Oakland, California, where she first began to learn about America’s funeral industry.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is Doughty’s account of her rise from humble beginnings as a 23-year-old body-van transport driver and crematory operator, to a formally trained mortician, funeral home owner, “death positive” advocate, and host of the internet-famous (more than 250 million views) YouTube series, “Ask a Mortician,” in which she fields questions from viewers like, “How long does rigor mortis last?” and “Why are funerals so expensive?”
Doughty doesn’t pull any punches when describing what happens to human bodies after death, and the most common American funeral processes of embalming and cremation; but she manages a respectful lightheartedness, and along the way provides some fascinating insights into the history of death rituals in different cultures and alternatives we may want to consider (before it’s too late…)
Interested in learning more? The American Board of Funeral Service Education is the accrediting agency for the nearly 60 mortuary science programs across the country, most of which are at community colleges (including Cape Cod and North Shore community colleges here in Massachusetts).
Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation by Parker Palmer (1999)
In Let Your Life Speak, his marvelous reflection on life, vocation and calling, Parker Palmer borrows a phrase from his Quaker background and encourages, “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.”
If I could recommend only one book to someone questing for their vocation, it would be this one, and indeed, I have recommended it or gifted it many times over the years. Writing honestly and vulnerably about his own career trajectory, from community organizer to teacher, from college dean to author, speaker and activist, Palmer weaves together the story of a life filled with false starts and foibles, alongside accomplishments and epiphanies, which only arrive when we listen to the voice of “true self” rather than what others expect or demand of us.
In my own career so far, I have been a truck driver, a carpenter, a writer, an actor, a director, a stagehand, a designer, a teacher, a dean, a provost, and now, a president. I held several jobs before I was “called” to teaching and education.
Butcher, baker, candlestick maker — chef, paramedic, mortician. They are all avenues for making your way in this world, and expressions of individual truths and values when you “let your life speak.”
