Meet the Author
Jeanne Marie Laskas is an associate professor and the director of the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh. Previously (1994-2008), she was a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post Magazine, writing weekly essays: “Significant Others.” She is the author of six books, including an award-winning trilogy of memoirs: Fifty Acres and a Poodle (2000), The Exact Same Moon (2003), and Growing Girls (2006).
Book Basics
Hidden America is an eye-opening journey into the vocational worlds that most people never consider, including many that provide the power and resources that enable our current quality of life. Laskas enters worlds normally off limits to journalists, including a coal mine in Ohio, an oil rig in Alaska, an air traffic control tower in New York, a migrant worker camp in Maine, a ranch in Texas, and a landfill in California. Additionally, she spends time in a gun shop in Arizona, with cheerleaders in Ohio, and with a trucker in Iowa. While seven of the nine chapters are reworked editions of content that originally appeared in GQ or Smithsonian, the book works well as a collection of essays. The diverse people she observes and interacts with who make this country work are employed in physically demanding jobs with responsibilities that differ widely from career paths most consider, yet almost everyone she encounters appreciates and takes pride in his or her work.
Hidden America is at once easy and difficult to read: easy as Laskas is an effective story teller; difficult as the work being done to enable the consumer lifestyle of an upwardly mobile society challenges assumptions and, at least for some, the validity of the existing norms. It is important to enter the everyday worlds of those who labor to provide food and energy rather than to learn of such only in light of and through the lens of tragedy.
So What?
While I have read many accounts of the work done by and working conditions of most of those profiled in Hidden America, I had never engaged in as wide-ranging a consideration as I did while reading this book. Completing the book is, or at least should be, an invitation to deeper inquiry.
- How many of the professions considered in Laskas’ book do you know much about?
- What other types of work that power America are rarely are profiled by the media?
- How does your religious perspective contribute to your understanding of what work is and should be? Of what working conditions are never acceptable?
Jeanne Marie Laskas. Hidden America: From Coal Miners to Cowboys, An Extraordinary Exploration of the Unseen People Who Make this Country Work (Putnam, 2012). ISBN: 9780399159008.