10 great books featuring working class heroes

nspired by a posthumous story collection from Lucia Berlin: a list of excellent stories starring proletarians too rarely given voice in industrial life.

2. "Nickel and Dimed," by Barbara Ehrenreich

It’s hard to believe that next year will be the 15th anniversary of the publication of "Nickel and Dimed." Ehrenreich’s seminal nonfiction book is an incisive and cutting exposé that’s still just as relevant today: a definitive example of immersive journalism. Rather than just writing about poverty, the author worked low-paying jobs, including stints as a maid, a waitress, and a Walmart employee. “The first thing I discovered is that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly ‘unskilled,’ ” she wrote. And while it’s true that she could return to her more privileged life at any moment, Ehrenreich’s experiment emphasized how difficult, discouraging, and exhausting it is to get by on pitiful wages.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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