2006-09-10 - 12:13 a.m. - Ten Thousand Working Days, by Robert Schrank
Genial memoir of a guy who worked in a bunch of different jobs, gradually wandering from working-class Depression roots through the union halls, politics, white-collar business, social administration, and finally sociology. Schrank is definitely a dude of his generation, and you'll have to excuse rampant bursts of nudge-nudge sexism to enjoy this at all. That aside, for the bulk of the book you get a very pleasant read, with Schrank taking on a familiar tone as he relates his favorite tales of life on the job. His real interest seems to be in on-the-job culture - the ways people working together get along with each other and make it through the day. His observations on this subject tend to be worthwhile, and I found fun in recognizing connections between Schrank's experiences in a machine shop and my own doing food service. He's at his best on the anecdotes, though - the most endearing and hilarious being the one where, as a strident youth raised by the Old Left to view miners as heroes of the working class, he heads off with the glorious dream of becoming a miner. Hijinks ensue!
Unfortunately, things start to go south as the book goes on. The anecdotes thin out and we start getting more studied observations. To some extent this serves one of the themes of the book: we can really feel Schrank's exhaustion as he is taken further and further away from the reinvigorating cameraderie of working men. Since this means he gets more and more boring, though, it's hard to really work up the energy to sympathize. This process bottoms out in the final chapter, which is supposedly about his work as a sociologist, but in fact is simply him as a sociologist writing an essay on his observation of various current trends in workplace management. It's a bizarre non sequitur and one that ends the book on a particularly dull note. The first half, though, is really cracking stuff if you take it as the well-polished anecdotes of a gregarious uncle.