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Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent
A story about growth, failure, and redemption, Ghosts of Tom Joad traces the rise of the working poor and the don’t-have-to-work-rich as it follows the fortunes of the protagonist Earl. A product of the post–Korean War era, Earl witnesses his parents’ kitchen table arguments over money—echoed in thousands of other Rust Belt towns—experiences bullying, relishes first kisses, and comes of age and matures as a man before the economic hardships of the 1980s and 1990s wear on his spirit. Earl takes his turn at a variety of low-paying retail jobs in the new economy before becoming mired in homelessness and succumbing to meth, alcohol, and destitution. As he takes a final, metaphorical bus ride, Earl reflects on his past, considering the impact of the war on his father—and, subsequently, on himself—his own demise, and the romance between himself and Angel, which ultimately redeems him. This is a tale about the death of manufacturing, the deindustrialization of America, and a way of life that has been irrevocably lost. Anyone interested in the impact of political and business policy on the American Dream will be drawn to this profound, humorous, and moving novel.
- GenresFictionContemporary
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2014
3 people are currently reading
321 people want to read
About the author
Peter Van Buren
5 books36 followersUnited States Foreign Service Officer (ret.) and author of Hooper's War Peter Van Buren spent a year in Iraq. Following his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, the Department of State began legal proceedings against him, falsely claiming the book revealed classified material. Through the efforts of the ACLU, Van Buren instead retired from the State Department with his First Amendment rights intact.
His second book, Ghosts of Tom Joad, A Story of the #99Percent is a novel about the social and economic changes in America after WWII and the decline of the blue collar middle class in the 1980s. The book anticipated the conditions that led many in America's Rust Belt to help elect Donald Trump.
Van Buren returns now with a deeply-researched anti-war novel, Hooper's War. Set in WWII Japan, Lieutenant Nate Hooper isn't sure he'll survive his war. And if he does make it home, he isn't sure he can survive the peace. He's done a terrible thing, and struggles to resolve the mistake he made alongside a Japanese soldier, and a Japanese woman who failed to save both men. At stake in this story of moral injury? Souls.
With allegorical connections to America's current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the reverse chronology telling of Hooper's War ("Fighting over the covers is better than remembering the empty side of the bed," Hooper says) turns a loss-of-innocence narrative into a complex tale of why that loss is inevitable in societies that go to war. Think Matterhorn and The Things They Carried, crossed with Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five.
Follow Peter on Twitter @wemeantwell and at www.wemeantwell.com
His second book, Ghosts of Tom Joad, A Story of the #99Percent is a novel about the social and economic changes in America after WWII and the decline of the blue collar middle class in the 1980s. The book anticipated the conditions that led many in America's Rust Belt to help elect Donald Trump.
Van Buren returns now with a deeply-researched anti-war novel, Hooper's War. Set in WWII Japan, Lieutenant Nate Hooper isn't sure he'll survive his war. And if he does make it home, he isn't sure he can survive the peace. He's done a terrible thing, and struggles to resolve the mistake he made alongside a Japanese soldier, and a Japanese woman who failed to save both men. At stake in this story of moral injury? Souls.
With allegorical connections to America's current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the reverse chronology telling of Hooper's War ("Fighting over the covers is better than remembering the empty side of the bed," Hooper says) turns a loss-of-innocence narrative into a complex tale of why that loss is inevitable in societies that go to war. Think Matterhorn and The Things They Carried, crossed with Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five.
Follow Peter on Twitter @wemeantwell and at www.wemeantwell.com
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
March 8, 2017
Painful to read. I wanted to like it more, because the issues it deals with are so important to me. In the end, though, Earl is composed more of rhetoric than of human attributes. His bus ride is an intellectual journey, not an emotional one.
March 14, 2015
What if we were to utter the phrase "My life literally flashed before my eyes" and be able to capture that in the essence of a book? Peter Van Buren has virtually done this in this story that revolves around a middle-aged man named Earl, down and out and riding on an allegorical bus throughout the memories of his life. The setting takes us through downtrodden Reeve, Ohio, in the heart of the Rust Belt laden with factories that men sought post-WWII and Korean War manufacturing employment in. But the world went and done changed itself. Got itself all technological and global. And generations of small towns were forgotten and left behind while the haves got richer and the pockets of the educated got deeper. Earl never recovered. Every small town stereotype is nailed in this book to the fringes of pity and the depths of sorrow and at the very least, the thankfulness of having escaped that scenario either by settlement or by generation. Earl played high school football where high school football was king. He was sure to score that scholarship to The Ohio State University until he suffered an injury, and then, well, why try at school anymore? Start hoping the old man gets you a job at the factory soon. Earl had a high school sweetheart, and he was gonna run away with her, but he had second thoughts halfway there. She didn't, off she went, and he spent the rest of his life pining for her. Earl's dad was a veteran with a drinking problem and not much of a dad either, screwed him up for life. And the list goes on. A terse, honest portrayal of the effect on the common man under the microscope of change from a society of industrial manufacturing to global technology in the Midwest throughout the latter half of the 20th Century. The last 1/5 of the book really devolves into a sad, inescapable conversation on that bus ride which, suffice to say, reaches the bus terminal.
September 29, 2015
I received this book from Netgalley for an honest review.
This is a depressing book. I grew up in Ohio, and while I never experienced what was related in this book, I see it in small towns not just in Ohio, but across the country. Officially, our government says we are seeing marked improvement in all sectors of the economy, but they aren't revealing the truth: the poor and lower middle class are no longer hanging on, and rest of us are barely scraping by.
Obviously, the title is an ode to the Grapes of Wrath, one of the greatest, and saddest, books written. The Ghosts of Tom Joad captures well the people's futility and desperation just like the Joad family heading from Oklahoma to California.
Not sure who I would recommend this book to, not because it was poorly written (it wasn't), but because of the shear depression-causing ability of the subject matter.
This is a depressing book. I grew up in Ohio, and while I never experienced what was related in this book, I see it in small towns not just in Ohio, but across the country. Officially, our government says we are seeing marked improvement in all sectors of the economy, but they aren't revealing the truth: the poor and lower middle class are no longer hanging on, and rest of us are barely scraping by.
Obviously, the title is an ode to the Grapes of Wrath, one of the greatest, and saddest, books written. The Ghosts of Tom Joad captures well the people's futility and desperation just like the Joad family heading from Oklahoma to California.
Not sure who I would recommend this book to, not because it was poorly written (it wasn't), but because of the shear depression-causing ability of the subject matter.
October 17, 2015
Ghosts of Tom Joad is referenced in the novel as a song performed by Rage Against the Machine. (Originally it was written by Bruce Springsteen then covered by Rage Against the Machine, but the band name "Rage Against the Machine" summarizes the essence of the feeling of futility Earl has, and therefore tries to impart to us.) Ghosts of Tom Joad also references Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. Both this novel and the song is based upon Grapes of Wrath.
This is not a novel to read if you are depressed or tend towards depression. It is sad. You want to rage against the events that lead to poverty, futility, lost hope, destroyed dreams. Van Buren inserts sermons on how and why events unfolded the way they did in the Rust Belt and the consequences of the death of the way things used to be. But the sermons are soft and palatable and worked in to the story so that they fall in place.
Earl is taking a metaphorical bus ride to the end and along the way he meets people he grew up with, family, friends, and they talk about their lives and how they ended up the way they ended up. There is redemption at the end, but it is too little too late.
This novel has its faults, to be sure, but the theme and the way it is treated redeems the faults.
This is not a novel to read if you are depressed or tend towards depression. It is sad. You want to rage against the events that lead to poverty, futility, lost hope, destroyed dreams. Van Buren inserts sermons on how and why events unfolded the way they did in the Rust Belt and the consequences of the death of the way things used to be. But the sermons are soft and palatable and worked in to the story so that they fall in place.
Earl is taking a metaphorical bus ride to the end and along the way he meets people he grew up with, family, friends, and they talk about their lives and how they ended up the way they ended up. There is redemption at the end, but it is too little too late.
This novel has its faults, to be sure, but the theme and the way it is treated redeems the faults.
April 9, 2015
Heartbreaking and rings so true. About an Everyman in contemporary America, a guy who can't get a job that will give him enough money to get married, start a family, have any stake at all in the country in which he grew up in a solidly working class family before the factories closed. Ghosts of Tom Joad captures the quiet despair of a disinherited generation in an America that has no more jobs for them, no more use for them, nothing but contempt for them.
October 8, 2020
UPDATE: I found this link today
http://wemeantwell.com/blog/2014/05/0...
There were pieces of machinery from the factory left on the ground, too unimportant to sell off, too heavy to move, too bulky to bury, left scattered like clues from a lost civilization, droppings of our failure. Might as well been the bones of the men who worked there. I think God owes us an apology.
Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the # 99 Percent by Peter Van Buren is a story of modern America’s Rust Belt. Van Buren is retired from the State Department. His career took him to Asia and Oceania. Van Buren also worked closely with the military including the Marines at Camp Lejeune.
The title of the book caught my attention mainly from the Bruce Springsteen album of the same name. It seems the author was more influenced by Rage Against the Machine version. I had to look up the Rage version and in the process found Springsteen performing the song with Tom Morello. The story is about Earl, a man growing up in a small, fictional, Ohio town of Reeves that survives off the glass factory. Aside from the draft or volunteering for the military most people work at the factory. The economy is starting to turn in the late 1970s. Slowdowns, overseas competition, and new technology attacked the American dream. America felt invulnerable and did too little too late to compete. Manufacturing was sold to foreign investors or simply moved overseas. It wasn’t a sudden collapse. There were signs. No money to pay for college. Wives working outside the home to help make ends meet. It was a slow collapse that no one wanted to see.
I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio around the time this story takes place. I could see some of this happening, and on my 18th birthday I signed up for the Marines. Industry was on the decline. There was no way I could afford college working as a cook at Howard Johnsons. Ghosts of Tom Joad brought back many memories of the city I left more than thirty years ago.
Every so often I pick up a book to review that not only wakes me up with a slap to the face but also beats me down and makes me realize how one decision put me where I am today and not unemployed, working for minimum wage, and a step away from being homeless. I felt very much like I could have been Earl if I had stayed. The story is very realistic and typical of the environment.
I highlighted and noted almost as many passages from this novel as I would from a nonfiction book on an unfamiliar subject. Some of the highlights are facts and others the author’s opinion in the words of a character.
"The economic word “flexibility” came in my lifetime to be a stand in for lower pay and fewer benefits. The system had been in place for my grandpa and and my dad: Put something into the factory and get something back from the factory… The rich men always had more but the working men had enough."
"Rock bottom ain’t a foundation."
“We had a Dairy Queen, a Catholic school and four Protestant churches” and a bowling alley. This like many lines in the book sound exactly like the town I left.
Reeve could be reduced down to this: “I was a boiler operator. So was my dad, Went to work everyday bit Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years and two weeks in the summer. Bought a car. Bought a house. Sent one son to college, gave one to the Marine Corps. Have a decent pension. Living quietly in the same house. Own it.”
Became this:
"I clean floors and stock warehouse shelves and deliver things you buy online and serve you food. I don’t have health insurance. I get sick, I don’t work, a bulls who balls have given out, I don’t get paid extra for working overtime or holidays because an hour is and hour no matter when I work it and I am not eligible for unemployment because I technically never had a real job in the first place to be unemployed from."
Things happen to cities when industry leaves. Drugs move in. Meth is mentioned in particular in this book, but two years I read that heroin was in my old hometown. This was a town where the marijuana was green when I went to school. In Reeves, drugs move in and are in demand. It is something to break the monotony and is cheaper than drinking. It comes to a point where the worker finally breaks down and says “Why not.” It is a sign of hopelessness.
More than just foreign investors move in; foreign corporations move in. We become the cheap labor for European and Asian automobile manufacturers. They build factories the same way we did in the third world. Towns fight for these factories with infrastructure improvements and tax breaks. “Detroit looks like Dresden after WWII and Dresden looks like Detroit before WWII.” Now, a nation of immigrants looks at other immigrants as the enemy: They take our jobs. Americans are forced to work as day laborers for a few dollars an hour or beg to work at a minimum wage big box stores, part time and without benefits.
Ghosts of Tom Joad is a book about the 99% but told from a very personal level. I needed to remind myself throughout the book that this is fiction, but it is also so many people’s real life story. It could have very well been my story. Van Buren laces factual information throughout the book, but it fits into the story. It does not read like a collection of statistics or a leftist/union propaganda brochure. It reads as real life. The only character in the story that seems to preach revolution/radical change is a preacher at a homeless shelter. Even the preacher's words seem to capture the message of Jesus and not the dogma of a church. This book is very well done on so many levels. The story and the message are both appropriate and accurate in America’s former industrial centers. Even though I left long ago, it is not something I, or anyone else, can run from forever. It is spreading across the country with every business that closes, every job that goes away and is replaced with a part time dead end job…”and you can’t build a nation on the working poor.”
http://wemeantwell.com/blog/2014/05/0...
There were pieces of machinery from the factory left on the ground, too unimportant to sell off, too heavy to move, too bulky to bury, left scattered like clues from a lost civilization, droppings of our failure. Might as well been the bones of the men who worked there. I think God owes us an apology.
Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the # 99 Percent by Peter Van Buren is a story of modern America’s Rust Belt. Van Buren is retired from the State Department. His career took him to Asia and Oceania. Van Buren also worked closely with the military including the Marines at Camp Lejeune.
The title of the book caught my attention mainly from the Bruce Springsteen album of the same name. It seems the author was more influenced by Rage Against the Machine version. I had to look up the Rage version and in the process found Springsteen performing the song with Tom Morello. The story is about Earl, a man growing up in a small, fictional, Ohio town of Reeves that survives off the glass factory. Aside from the draft or volunteering for the military most people work at the factory. The economy is starting to turn in the late 1970s. Slowdowns, overseas competition, and new technology attacked the American dream. America felt invulnerable and did too little too late to compete. Manufacturing was sold to foreign investors or simply moved overseas. It wasn’t a sudden collapse. There were signs. No money to pay for college. Wives working outside the home to help make ends meet. It was a slow collapse that no one wanted to see.
I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio around the time this story takes place. I could see some of this happening, and on my 18th birthday I signed up for the Marines. Industry was on the decline. There was no way I could afford college working as a cook at Howard Johnsons. Ghosts of Tom Joad brought back many memories of the city I left more than thirty years ago.
Every so often I pick up a book to review that not only wakes me up with a slap to the face but also beats me down and makes me realize how one decision put me where I am today and not unemployed, working for minimum wage, and a step away from being homeless. I felt very much like I could have been Earl if I had stayed. The story is very realistic and typical of the environment.
I highlighted and noted almost as many passages from this novel as I would from a nonfiction book on an unfamiliar subject. Some of the highlights are facts and others the author’s opinion in the words of a character.
"The economic word “flexibility” came in my lifetime to be a stand in for lower pay and fewer benefits. The system had been in place for my grandpa and and my dad: Put something into the factory and get something back from the factory… The rich men always had more but the working men had enough."
"Rock bottom ain’t a foundation."
“We had a Dairy Queen, a Catholic school and four Protestant churches” and a bowling alley. This like many lines in the book sound exactly like the town I left.
Reeve could be reduced down to this: “I was a boiler operator. So was my dad, Went to work everyday bit Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years and two weeks in the summer. Bought a car. Bought a house. Sent one son to college, gave one to the Marine Corps. Have a decent pension. Living quietly in the same house. Own it.”
Became this:
"I clean floors and stock warehouse shelves and deliver things you buy online and serve you food. I don’t have health insurance. I get sick, I don’t work, a bulls who balls have given out, I don’t get paid extra for working overtime or holidays because an hour is and hour no matter when I work it and I am not eligible for unemployment because I technically never had a real job in the first place to be unemployed from."
Things happen to cities when industry leaves. Drugs move in. Meth is mentioned in particular in this book, but two years I read that heroin was in my old hometown. This was a town where the marijuana was green when I went to school. In Reeves, drugs move in and are in demand. It is something to break the monotony and is cheaper than drinking. It comes to a point where the worker finally breaks down and says “Why not.” It is a sign of hopelessness.
More than just foreign investors move in; foreign corporations move in. We become the cheap labor for European and Asian automobile manufacturers. They build factories the same way we did in the third world. Towns fight for these factories with infrastructure improvements and tax breaks. “Detroit looks like Dresden after WWII and Dresden looks like Detroit before WWII.” Now, a nation of immigrants looks at other immigrants as the enemy: They take our jobs. Americans are forced to work as day laborers for a few dollars an hour or beg to work at a minimum wage big box stores, part time and without benefits.
Ghosts of Tom Joad is a book about the 99% but told from a very personal level. I needed to remind myself throughout the book that this is fiction, but it is also so many people’s real life story. It could have very well been my story. Van Buren laces factual information throughout the book, but it fits into the story. It does not read like a collection of statistics or a leftist/union propaganda brochure. It reads as real life. The only character in the story that seems to preach revolution/radical change is a preacher at a homeless shelter. Even the preacher's words seem to capture the message of Jesus and not the dogma of a church. This book is very well done on so many levels. The story and the message are both appropriate and accurate in America’s former industrial centers. Even though I left long ago, it is not something I, or anyone else, can run from forever. It is spreading across the country with every business that closes, every job that goes away and is replaced with a part time dead end job…”and you can’t build a nation on the working poor.”
May 11, 2014
It’s a really good story about what happens to people in a dying economy and how they manage to cope with it. It definitely keeps your interest and is quite the unexpected page turner. It would rank up there with the best murder mysteries from real life. And even though there really is no body, the mystery was the fact the town was dying, no one was staying and none knew how to fix the problem. So if you want a little insight on small town Americana and how people were trying to manage in a rotten economy, check out this book. It is really good,even if a little depressing at times and it’s told by Earl and the cast of characters he meets, wherever he is or if he is just traveling down memory lane.
June 9, 2014
An interesting perspective on the state modern America told by an ex state department official who has been out of the country for years. Its described the depressing truth of the conditions of most small town America after the local manufacturing has been out sourced to else where.
March 24, 2022
"Ghosts of Tom Joad" had been on my to-read list for a good while now and I finally picked up a copy recently. It's gritty, powerful, and enjoyable to read. Peter Van Buren tells the story of Earl, who lives a rough life in the ruins of the Rust Belt. No longer able to count on a job at the local factory, Earl bounces from gig to gig and falls deeper into despair. Van Buren doesn't sugarcoat the old world, showing how stress, alcoholism, and bullying had a place in town even when there were jobs. Whatever ills existed before, the sucking sound of jobs leaving rural Ohio made everything worse. Now, drugs, crime, and other forms of blight swooped in.
The book is told from Earl's perspective, as he rides a "bus" and encounters stories and figures from his past. This "bus" is metaphorical, and Earl is an imperfect narrator, perhaps undergoing some kind of mental break. Earl's journey walks readers through his life from childhood onward, and it's often painful and emotional. The book is also full of illuminating dialogue, although some characters primarily interject Van Buren's political/economic opinions into the work. Nevertheless, I appreciated his perspective, however unsubtle it could be. Throughout, Van Buren assails those who sold out Middle America from Washington and Wall Street, while explaining that neither the poor nor immigrants should not be blamed for this predicament. "Ghosts of Tom Joad" is a good populist novel.
The book is told from Earl's perspective, as he rides a "bus" and encounters stories and figures from his past. This "bus" is metaphorical, and Earl is an imperfect narrator, perhaps undergoing some kind of mental break. Earl's journey walks readers through his life from childhood onward, and it's often painful and emotional. The book is also full of illuminating dialogue, although some characters primarily interject Van Buren's political/economic opinions into the work. Nevertheless, I appreciated his perspective, however unsubtle it could be. Throughout, Van Buren assails those who sold out Middle America from Washington and Wall Street, while explaining that neither the poor nor immigrants should not be blamed for this predicament. "Ghosts of Tom Joad" is a good populist novel.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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April 8, 2016
This well written book tells the story of many working poor in America today. Though it is starts in 1977, it illustrates real issues we still have today. The title harkens back to the Grapes of Wrath and there are disturbing similarities among those time periods. This book needs to be read by people so we can better understand what many families are facing. Many challenging topics are in this book and it is brutally honest at times. That can make it hard to read, but it is worth the effort.
March 31, 2016
Anthem for the revolution. Best lines- "...but in the end the most contagious thing you encounter is despair." and "Making deals just creates wealth for the dealers." The millions of Earls will not stay quiet forever.
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