Gig - John Bowe

"An engaging, humorous, revealing, and refreshingly
human look at the bizarre, life-threatening, and delightfully humdrum exploits of
everyone from sports heroes to sex workers."
-- Douglas Rushkoff, author of Coercion,
Ecstasy Club, and Media Virus

This wide-ranging
survey of the American economy at the turn of the
millennium is stunning, surprising, and always entertaining. It gives us an
unflinching view of the fabric of this
country from the point of view of
the people who keep it all moving. The more than 120 roughly textured monologues that make up Gig beautifully capture the voices of our fast-paced and diverse economy.
The selections demonstrate how much our world has changed--and stayed
the same--in the three decades prior to the turn of the millennium. If you think things have speeded
up, become more complicated and more technological, you're right.

But people's attitudes about their jobs, their hopes and goals and
disappointments, endure. Gig's soul isn't sociological--it's emotional. The wholehearted diligence
that people bring to their work is deeply, inexplicably moving. People
speak in these pages of the constant and complex stresses nearly all of
them confront on the job, but, nearly universally, they throw themselves
without reservation into coping with them. Instead of resisting work,
we seem to adapt to it. Some of us love our jobs, some of us don't, but
almost all of us are not quite sure what we would do without one.

With all the hallmarks of another classic on this subject, Gig is a fabulous read, filled with indelible voices from coast to coast.
After hearing them, you'll never again feel quite the same about how we
work.