Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #480235 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Customer Reviews

Both funny and tragic
Iain Levison can find work but not fulfilment. The frustration of dead-end, deadhead labour induces a frustration syndrome as the realization sets in that his college degree in English literature will gain him little by way of psychic wages on the job. He is adrift in a workaday world where one human is as good as the next and all are expendable. Meaningless promises abound, "like when they were telling us [at commencement that] we were the future of the world". In ten years, Iain Levison has lived in six states and worked at forty-two jobs; from fish cutter in Alaska to furniture mover in North Carolina, film-set gopher, oil deliveryman, truck driver, and crab fisherman. He quit thirty of them, got fired from nine, and has difficulty remembering the other three. Whatever could go wrong often did, hilariously
It is a funny book about the not-so-funny American workplace. The real thing, written not by a high-priced journalist disguised as a counter clerk, or a tenured professor passing as a vagrant, but by a genuine wage-dependent, red-blooded working stiff too "rich" for welfare and too broke to fit a consumer demographic. He works to keep his car running to get back and forth from work. He works to get by and get back for the next day's labours.

Workin' 9 to 5 what a way to make a livin
Only 1 review! Poor bloke, here's my two cents. I read this doozy over a year ago but I still remember enjoying it immensely. The story: twenty something gets a liberal arts uni degree and struggles to find work though from no lack of effort. Sound familiar? Certainly does to me! Levison (a Scot living in America) does what he can to stay afloat and find something fulfilling and pays well.

Like I said, it's been a year but there was one unforgettable sequence where he gets a job aboard a fishing ship for (what he thinks) will be $3000 for 2 weeks work (turns out it was dependent on how much fish they catch and they didn't catch many. Needless to say it was far less than £3k). His job is to sit in a hold with a shovel and wait for a ton of fish to drop down atop him. He then shovels the fish down a chute but the effort numbs his arms and he resorts sitting on a pile near the chute to using his legs. There's a powerful moment near the end of his shift where his body is so battered and numb that he kicks the last few hundred of fish down the chute while screaming at the sky that's raining down on him.

Besides this moment, the entire book (short at about 200 pages) is about genuinely funny moments in his everyman career. Levison comes across as very likeable and very articulate, and the book flies by. I've had jobs in America and Japan as well as the UK where I'm now living and wanted to write a book like this. Having read Levison's I can say his experiences are far more entertaining and funny.

I checked out his other two books, both novels, and loved them. "Since the Layoffs" is similar in theme to "Manifesto" as it details an unemployed chap in a dying town who turns to a career as a hitman, while "Dog Eats Dog" continues the crime theme with great success. I urge you to check this writer out. He's awfully underrated and unheard of and it's unfair that such a talent goes unnoticed while millions of dunderheads wait salivating for Dan Brown's next load of tripe (are the made up lies in Brown's novel true? Tony Robinson sets out to investigate). I also recommend Hunger by Knut Hamsun if you enjoyed this book.