My Job: Real People at Work Around the World

by Suzanne Skees (Editor)

Overview

MY JOB: Real People at Work Around the World, is a collection of vivid first-person accounts of real people in unique jobs, in the U.S. and the world. Never before has such a collection of stories been gathered. Building upon the legacy of Studs Terkel’s 1970s bestseller Working, MY JOB goes global and updated, reflecting the daily struggles and successes of working storytellers in their own distinctive voices.

MY JOB explores the dignity, identity, economic viability, and inherent challenges of each occupation. How has the definition and notion of a job shifted in recent years? How does one land in a particular job, and what causes one to flourish or flounder in it? How does our job shape our sense of identity? And how does an identity built around work impact other facets of our lives?

As communications and social media transform our world into a global village, readers are exposed to life and work in other places. Our awareness of countries and cultures far beyond home leads to a natural interest in them. This is a pivotal moment in which geography still greatly impacts employment; yet the experiences of others, even in distant countries, are more accessible today than ever before.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780996295109
Publisher:	Titletown Publishing, LLC
Publication date:	11/14/2016
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 16.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Suzanne Skees works in international development as director of the Skees Family Foundation. She holds masters’ degrees in English literature from Boston College and world religions from Harvard Divinity School. Suzanne Skees has authored a book published by Hyperion and has worked in publishing as a book editor for Houghton Mifflin.

The Skees Family Foundation (SFF) is  a small nonprofit comprised of thirty family members across three generations. SFF provides seed-funding, advisory, and storytelling support for innovative programs for self-help out of poverty via education and enterprise in the U.S. and developing economies around the world. SFF, launched in 2004, has become known for its networks of social entrepreneurs and intuitive seed-funding of pragmatic poverty-alleviation programs.

Editorial Reviews

2018-04-24
A collection of intimate interviews with people regarding the personal, familial, cultural, and geographic factors in their working lives. Inspired by Studs Terkel's Working (1974), which profiled ordinary American workers, editor Skees (God Among the Shakers, 1998) takes the concept global. Six of her 16 subjects live in the United States, including a slack-key guitarist in Honolulu, an architect in Cincinnati, and a recruiter/headhunter in Tampa, Florida. The rest are on other continents, including a coffee farmer in Nicaragua, a Masai warrior in Tanzania, a married couple running an eco-friendly factory in India, a rickshaw puller in Bangladesh, and a private equity manager in Hong Kong. Skees organizes the material into five sections ("Entrepreneurship," "Industry and Transportation," "Farming, Food, and Animals," "Finance and Technology," and "Music & Arts"), but each first-person account stands on its own, and they can be read in any order. A map, photograph, and editor's note introduce each, and footnotes supplement the text. Skees nimbly maintains a consistent narrative flow, with none of the readability problems that are common in transcriptions. Whereas Terkel packed a great many workers into his book, Skees gives her subjects more space to muse, digress, and occasionally contradict themselves. The results are highly personal, often poignant, sometimes gritty, and routinely granular—perhaps more than some readers may expect, or even desire. The editor sets out to demonstrate that "our job = our self." But such detailed portraits also reveal that formula's commutative property—how personal preferences, chance, circumstances, and location shape each person's job choice and performance. Skees is a nonprofit international development specialist, and doing work that contributes to the greater good emerges as a strong theme. As a result, this is a small, and perhaps skewed, sample of the world's workforce (although a second volume is forthcoming), but it will inspire readers by showcasing workers across diverse industries, income levels, countries, and cultures expressing how they find meaning in their work beyond earning money.A vocational and sociological travelogue that readers will find to be time well spent.

Kirkus Reviews