Free Ebook Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, by Alfred Lubrano
Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, By Alfred Lubrano When composing can alter your life, when composing can improve you by supplying much cash, why do not you try it? Are you still quite baffled of where understanding? Do you still have no suggestion with exactly what you are visiting write? Currently, you will certainly need reading Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, By Alfred Lubrano A good author is an excellent viewers at once. You can define exactly how you create depending on what books to check out. This Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, By Alfred Lubrano could help you to fix the issue. It can be one of the appropriate resources to create your composing ability.
Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, by Alfred Lubrano
Free Ebook Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, by Alfred Lubrano
Just how if your day is started by reading a book Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, By Alfred Lubrano Yet, it remains in your gadget? Everyone will always touch as well as us their device when awakening and also in early morning tasks. This is why, we intend you to likewise check out a publication Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, By Alfred Lubrano If you still puzzled the best ways to obtain guide for your gadget, you could adhere to the means here. As here, our company offer Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, By Alfred Lubrano in this internet site.
Maintain your method to be here and read this web page finished. You could take pleasure in browsing the book Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, By Alfred Lubrano that you actually refer to get. Here, getting the soft data of the book Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, By Alfred Lubrano can be done conveniently by downloading in the link page that we provide right here. Of course, the Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, By Alfred Lubrano will certainly be your own faster. It's no need to wait for guide Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, By Alfred Lubrano to get some days later after purchasing. It's no have to go outside under the warms at center day to go to guide establishment.
This is some of the advantages to take when being the participant and also obtain the book Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, By Alfred Lubrano here. Still ask what's various of the various other site? We offer the hundreds titles that are developed by recommended writers as well as publishers, around the globe. The connect to buy as well as download Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, By Alfred Lubrano is also quite easy. You could not discover the complicated site that order to do even more. So, the means for you to obtain this Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, By Alfred Lubrano will be so easy, will not you?
Based upon the Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, By Alfred Lubrano specifics that our company offer, you may not be so confused to be right here and to be participant. Obtain currently the soft data of this book Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, By Alfred Lubrano and also wait to be all yours. You saving can lead you to evoke the convenience of you in reading this book Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, By Alfred Lubrano Even this is types of soft file. You could actually make better opportunity to get this Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, By Alfred Lubrano as the suggested book to check out.
In Limbo, award-winning journalist Alfred Lubrano identifies and describes an overlooked cultural phenomenon: the internal conflict within individuals raised in blue-collar homes, now living white-collar lives. These people often find that the values of the working class are not sufficient guidance to navigate the white-collar world, where unspoken rules reflect primarily upper-class values. Torn between the world they were raised in and the life they aspire too, they hover between worlds, not quite accepted in either. Himself the son of a Brooklyn bricklayer, Lubrano informs his account with personal experience and interviews with other professionals living in limbo. For millions of Americans, these stories will serve as familiar reminders of the struggles of achieving the American Dream.
- Sales Rank: #116207 in Books
- Published on: 2005-02-22
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .65" w x 6.00" l, .66 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 248 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Lubrano's view of the challenges that upwardly mobile children of blue-collar families (he calls them Straddlers) face in establishing themselves in white-collar enclaves could spark lively debates among Straddlers themselves, not to mention those Lubrano views as having a head start based on birth into a white-collar family. In this combination of memoir and survey, the Philadelphia Inquirer staff reporter recalls his freshman year at Columbia; he'd expected classmates to regard him as sophisticated because he was a New Yorker. However, this son of a Brooklyn bricklayer found himself on the outside of elite cliques populated by men he characterizes as "pasty, slight fellas-all of them seemed 5-foot-7 and sandy-haired." This was only the beginning for Lubrano, who came to see entry into a select educational institution as a harsh cultural dividing line between his blue-collar upbringing and his white-collar future. Becoming a journalist cost him emotionally when he felt torn between abandoning cherished values from his youth and accommodating his new profession's demands. Lubrano's interviews with other Straddlers have convinced him that ambition puts many of them in positions fraught with similar ambivalence and unexpected culture shock. With quotes from Richard Rodriguez and bell hooks, Lubrano illustrates his thesis: "Limbo folk remain aware of their `otherness' throughout their lives [and remain] perpetual outsiders." Yet he's quick to recognize individual Straddlers who've persevered in the face of those outsider feelings (though, regrettably, he doesn't share self-reflection). Straddlers' ultimate challenge, Lubrano opines, is to be as steadfast and self-possessed in reconciling their white-collar present with their blue-collar heritage as they have been in achieving their professional goals.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
This country always celebrates the idea that there is enormous opportunity here to move up from one's station in life, to achieve greatness from the most humble of roots. But for those who are the first from a traditionally blue-collar family to enter college and move into the white-collar workplace, there is a darker side to success when they find themselves alienated from both their own family and their strange new middle-class world. Lubrano, himself an Italian American son of a bricklayer who transcended his roots to become an award-winning journalist, wrote this book in an attempt to reconcile this dichotomy and explore the unique challenges of this transitional social class. Interspersed with his own story are the stories of more than 100 others whom he calls "Straddlers" because they straddle two worlds, "many of them not feeling at home in either, living in a kind of American limbo." This is an emotionally charged study of class values, a subject even touchier than race or gender. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Lubrano's view of the challenges that upwardly mobile children of blue-collar families (he calls them Straddlers) face in establishing themselves in white-collar enclaves could spark lively debates among Straddlers themselves, not to mention those Lubrano views as having a head start based on birth into a white-collar family. In this combination of memoir and survey, the Philadelphia Inquirer staff reporter recalls his freshman year at Columbia; he'd expected classmates to regard him as sophisticated because he was a New Yorker. However, this son of a Brooklyn bricklayer found himself on the outside of elite cliques populated by men he characterizes as "pasty, slight fellas-all of them seemed 5-foot-7 and sandy-haired." This was only the beginning for Lubrano, who came to see entry into a select educational institution as a harsh cultural dividing line between his blue-collar upbringing and his white-collar future. Becoming a journalist cost him emotionally when he felt torn between abandoning cherished values from his youth and accommodating his new profession's demands. Lubrano's interviews with other Straddlers have convinced him that ambition puts many of them in positions f raught with similar ambivalence and unexpected culture shock. With quotes from Richard Rodriguez and bell hooks, Lubrano illustrates his thesis: "Limbo folk remain aware of their 'otherness' throughout their lives [and remain] perpetual outsiders." Yet he's quick to recognize individual Straddlers who've persevered in the face of those outsider feelings (though, regrettably, he doesn't share self-reflection). Straddlers' ultimate challenge, Lubrano opines, is to be as steadfast and self-possessed in reconciling their white-collar present with their blue-collar heritage as they have been in achieving their professional goals. Agent, David Vigliano. (Nov.)
Forecast: A national advertising and publicity campaign and co-promotions with the Philadelphia Inquirer and NPR should attract readers who've experienced the duality Lubrano describes. (Publishers Weekly, July 28, 2003)
An award-winning reporter with the Philadelphia Inquirer and commentator for National Public Radio, he owns 11 backyard-bred horses on a farm in South Jersey: "I hold our chestnut yearling Beau Soleil as a friend French braids his blond mane in preparation for his Devon debut," he reports. Life is good-but that's the problem: Lubrano cannot reconcile his father's being a construction worker with his becoming an aflluent professional. The result is Limbo, a stringing together of Lubrano's and others' thoughts on the pain of straddling two different worlds. Lubrano's journalism background apparently precludes any sociological methodology: the narrative is full of broad generalizations with little substantiation. One may wonder what country Lubrano was born in: aren't most Americans of a "hybrid class"? Don't most parents aspire to have their children exceed their own station in life? And what about the current glut of unemployed graduates? Now there's a problem. My advice: Lubrano should stop kvetching, and librarians should save their money for Sherry B. Ortner's New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of '58, which explores the forces that influenced the author's classmates' lives after graduation. Many of them went from blue-collar families to the middle class, but Ortner analyzes the phenomenon with scholarly expertise rather than bemoaning it. —Ellen D. Gilbert, Princeton, NJ (Library Journal, October 1, 2003)
One of the lies we tell ourselves, as a nation, is that there are no real class boundaries here - or, at least, none that can't be overcome by determination and hard work. Anyone can be president, right? That's why we've had so many working-class presidents over the years, so many vice presidents from the ghetto, so many cabinet secretaries from the barrio and the hollow, so many Supreme Court justices whose fathers were plumbers.
With another presidential election clicking into gear, the issue of class is sure to be raised, but it will be quickly doused by one millionaire candidate or another saying something like: "Now, now, no one wants a class war in America." True, no one wants a class war. In fact, we want so badly to avoid a class war that we're afraid even to initiate the kinds of national discussions we've managed to have about race, gender and sexuality. Part of this comes from the fact that the poor and working classes have no voice in the American media elite. Part of it is more subtle: Though the law offers equal opportunity to members of the lower classes, there are enormous psychological barriers to upward mobility, and, often, an enormous price to be paid by those who overcome them.
In Limbo, his brilliant examination of people who have climbed from the poor or working classes into the middle and upper classes, Alfred Lubrano knocks down one of the walls that keep the class issue out of sight and earshot, and floods the subject with light. Born to a tough, kind Brooklyn bricklayer and a knowledge-hungry housewife, Lubrano now lives on a horse farm, is a reporter for The Inquirer, and does commentary for National Public Radio, so he knows the joys and perils of this climb, and writes about them with an authority unavailable to someone merely making an academic study.
Limbo is a pitch-perfect interweaving of his own story - as neighborhood kid, Columbia scholarship student, newspaper reporter - with the stories of others who have made a similar journey. Some of the others, such as writers Richard Rodriguez and Dana Gioia, are well known. All are successful - surgeons, professors, executives, lawyers, teachers. And, beneath the business suits and degrees, all of them carry histories that reach back to the mean streets, the factories and farms, the dinner tables and bars at which their unschooled parents and less talented, less ambitious, or simply more frightened peers talked to them about the snobbery of the well-educated and well-off. "This book," Lubrano writes, "is a step toward understanding what people gain and what they leave behind as they move from the working class to the middle class."
We already have an idea what they gain - nicer homes, cars and vacations, safer schools for their kids, safer jobs for themselves. But Lubrano wisely gives equal time to what they leave behind - the directness and authenticity of their hardworking relatives; the rough, honest humor of their peers; a humility and a courage born of daily discomfort.
"Much about working-class life is admirable and fine," Lubrano writes. "The trick is to avoid glorifying it without painting life in it too darkly." So he gives us the racism, sexism and small-mindedness, too, the crippling envy and pettiness, all the things that pushed his aptly named "Straddlers" out of the old neighborhood in the first place.
After the Straddlers have earned their degrees, moved away from the familiar streets, and embarked on the types of careers their parents once spoke about with envy or disdain, they face challenges parallel to those faced by immigrants to the land of plenty. Lubrano details those challenges in chapters on the workplace, dating, marriage and child-rearing. His research is extensive, and the stories he elicits from interviewees are touching and raw.
There is the woman who loses on purpose while playing Scrabble with her less-well-educated mother; a young man who spends months carefully talking his closed-minded father into letting him go to college. Lubrano presents their stories sympathetically, linked to them as he is by his own uncomfortable adjustment to the bright new world of American success: "I often feel inhabited by two people who don't speak to each other."
That duality will be intimately familiar to readers who have moved from humble backgrounds well up into the middle class, from Campbell's soup to sushi, from stifling apartments to summer homes, from a sweaty tribal comfort to an anxious open-mindedness. But this book is too good and too important to be limited to a narrow audience. In Limbo, Alfred Lubrano has said something fresh and true about our simplistic myth of upward mobility, and in doing so he has illuminated the panoply of fear, hope, envy, courage and sacrifice that lies at the very heart of the American dream. (The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 2, 2003)
"Hopefully, this superbly written book will give voice to the millions who have to make this transition...." (San Francisco Chronicle, November 2, 2003)
Most helpful customer reviews
57 of 58 people found the following review helpful.
At long last...
By Gina Marie Antonelli
This is a book that really resonated with me. Having grown up in a blue-collar family, it has helped me understand an uneasy, unnameable feeling I've carried with me my whole life. As a child, they called me "encyclopedia." When I graduated from college, my working class family and neighborhood seemed more distant than ever. People called me "Professor" and made fun of the way I spoke. When I began working, that turned out to be no picnic either. Everyone around me dressed and acted differently. They seemed to have all grown up in tennis whites, having "coming out" parties, and living a far easier life. I've never spent much time thinking about "class" in relation to my career, but "Limbo" gets to the heart of what I've been feeling all these years. It's been not only fascinating, but, in an odd way, liberating as well. (You know, once you no longer feel as if you're the only one....) Few books I've ever read have offered the kind of insight that Mr. Lubrano has brought to this important subject. I thank him for this book.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Straddlers alert -for you.
By Amazon Customer
Great book for a straddler - child of blue collar parents who became a doctor, lawyer, dentist or other successful.professional. I often thought of myself as a :blue collar kind of guy" - I'm an attorney.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Striking a Cord
By J. H. Swain
This book struck a cord with me and obviously strikes a cord with many readers. It is not a page turner in the sense of a suspense novel, however, I did find myself looking forward to each reading. It is mostly a compilation of anecdotes and conclusions from anecdotes. There's little statisical or "scientific" data. Nevertheless, the individual stories are quite compelling.
The book focuses almost exclusively on first generation college/professional whites from working class/skilled labor backgrounds. Most of these folks would be at least one economic class removed (higher income) than most working class minority families in that thier jobs appear to be in the heart of "blue-collardom", that is union jobs and similar skilled factory or labor wage work with relative employment stability. The success of the subjects is still remarkably laudable and certainly in thier eyes and in the eyes of the author, exceptional.
Particularly interesting were the discussions of familiy reluctance to "let go" of the subjects and family resistance to the subjects refusal to buy into their cultural/socio-economic inheritance. A little more insight into the conflicting feelings (if any) experienced by the parents (who might say something like "I want my kids to do better than me without thinking that they are better than me") would have added a nice balance. Unfortunatley, given the age of many of the subjects (approaching middle age) maybe many of the parents were no longer available to be interviewed.
Interesting also was the abscence, on the whole, of any larger social "make the world a better place" motivation on the part of the subjects. My thought is that this factor would play a much larger part in the motivation for similar class jumping minoritites. For these folks though it seemed to be all about "self actualization." Also missing was any discussion about them sharing financial burdens with thier "left behind" family members. This too would play a much larger part in a description of class changeover among minorities. More discussion of so-called racial minorities as subjects would have been an added strength but, maybe there's another book to be written in this regard.
This book would have benefitted from more statistical data in the manner of "Nickeled and Dimed" but it is more of a "voice" piece than an advocacy piece. Overall, it is well worth reading as an enlightening look at the ramifications of class jumping and the subtle and not so subtle subtexts to life in the class change over lane.
Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, by Alfred Lubrano PDF
Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, by Alfred Lubrano EPub
Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, by Alfred Lubrano Doc
Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, by Alfred Lubrano iBooks
Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, by Alfred Lubrano rtf
Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, by Alfred Lubrano Mobipocket
Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, by Alfred Lubrano Kindle
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar