Down the Up Escalator: How the 99 Percent Live in the Great Recession

by Barbara Garson

One of our most incisive and committed journalists—author of the classic All the Livelong Day—shows us the real human cost of our economic follies.

The Great Recession has thrown huge economic chal­lenges at almost all Americans save the super-affluent few, and we are only now beginning to reckon up the human toll it is taking. Down the Up Escalator is an urgent dispatch from the front lines of our vast collective struggle to keep our heads above water and maybe even—someday—get ahead. Garson has interviewed an economically and geographically wide variety of Americans to show the pain­ful waste in all this loss and insecurity, and describe how individuals are coping. Her broader historical focus, though, is on the causes and consequences of the long stag­nation of wages and how it has resulted in an increasingly desperate reliance on credit and a series of ever-larger bubbles—stocks, technology, real estate. This is no way to run an economy, or a democracy.

From the members of the Pink Slip Club in New York, to a California home health-care aide on the eve of eviction, to a subprime mortgage broker who still thinks it could have worked, Down the Up Escalator presents a sobering picture of what happens to a society when it becomes economically organized to benefit only the very rich and the quick-buck speculators. But it also demonstrates the wit and resilience of ordinary Americans—and why they deserve so much better than the hand they’ve been dealt.

Genres: Nonfiction, Economics, Sociology, History, Business, Social Issues, Politics

290 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 21, 2011

About the author

Barbara Garson is an American playwright, author and social activist, perhaps best known for the play MacBird. Garson attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a B.A. specializing in Classical History in 1964. She was active in the Free Speech Movement, as the editor of The Free Speech Movement Newsletter, which was printed on an offset press that she herself had restored. She was one of 800 arrested on December 2, 1964 at a sit-in at Sproul Hall, Berkeley, following the "Machine Speech" by Mario Savio. In 1968, Garson had a child, Juliet, and in 1969 she went to work at The Shelter Half, an anti-war GI coffee house near Fort Lewis Army base in Tacoma, Washington. In the early 1970s, she moved to Manhattan, publishing short, humorous essays and theater reviews primarily for The Village Voice as well as plays.

Reviews

[Yenta Knows · Rating 4 out of 5]

Barbara Garson seems like a wonderful person. I can imagine knocking on her door to borrow a cup of sugar and leaving three hours later, after stimulating conversation punctuated with rueful laughter.

This book puts a human face on the squeezing of the middle class. She talks with many different people, all of who have been deeply harmed in different ways. It's important to remember that economics is not just lines on a graph -- it's highly skilled middle aged men who have been unemployed for 18 months, students forced to move from a foreclosed house during exam week, pensioners calculating which bill not to pay. Garson hits us in our hearts. We need to be hit there.

Two minor criticisms:
I had a version of the "Chinese food syndrome". No portrait has much depth, so I didn't remember any of the people well. Her final summary refers to certain characters from earlier in the book. I didn't remember them. I had to review the original interview.

The portraits seem lightly fictionalized. There is a lot of dialog, and it's well done. But it seems like the dialog from a screenplay, not the words you'd actually hear if you had recorded the conversation.

Final comment, but not a criticism:
There is not a lot of theory or explanation in this book. I'm now reading "The Great Divergence" and hope this work by an economic journalist addresses that lack. This isn't a criticism because it's not what Garson set out to do.

[Desiree · Rating 4 out of 5]

An honest look at our current economy through the eyes of those who have been hurt by the recession. I found parts of it difficult to read, especially the stories about people who lost their homes through no fault of their own. She does an excellent job interviewing people from all over the United States and from all walks of life!

I was somewhat surprised reading about the mortgages that were collateralized prior to even being granted and by the fact that the same mortgage was sold many times over. People made a ton of money betting that these people would NOT be able to pay their home loans....

The book is about much more than just mortgages though and I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for more insight into how we got where we are today!

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was interesting but very lightweight. It was more of an extended magazine article than a book, because I wouldn't expect to be able to read 300 pages of non-fiction in a few hours. However, for what it is, it's good. The author talks to various people affected by the recession and hears their stories and their theories on why things happened as they did. I don't know many people who have to scramble the way her subjects do and it was useful to get a sense for what life is like for them.

[Carly Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written account of the effects of the Great Recession on average middle class Americans. Garson looks at people who have lost jobs, lost homes, and lost investment income. Written in the first person (and with some personal information) this is a clear account that shows the human cost behind the machinations of Wall Street.

[Melissa · Rating 2 out of 5]

“If you’re not a worker, not a consumer, and you don’t earn significant income from investments, then you don’t have much of a place in capitalist society. In the course of this recession millions more of us have slipped into that no place. Most of us will still manage to eat and keep our televisions connected. But it can’t be pleasant to live in a country whose elite have no regular use for us.” (pg. 269)

This quote, coming at the end of Down the Up Escalator: How the 99% Live in the Great Recession, captures the feeling of this book pretty well. And we’ll come back to this in a bit. In the meantime though, misery loves company, right? That must have been what I think I was thinking when I requested (and received) an advance readers copy of Down the Up Escalator from NetGalley.

(A disclaimer: this review is based on the audiobook narrated by Jeanine Klein as well as the print version from my library, which all the quotes are taken from.)

I’d imagine that the target reader for Down the Up Escalator is someone like me. Someone who has truly, honest-to-God been irreversibly financially impacted by the economy on each one of the three levels that Barbara Garson highlights in Down the Up Escalator - the housing/mortgage crisis (check), long term unemployment (check) and depletion of personal savings (annnnd, check!).

The personal stories of my peers are, indeed, at the heart of this book. As they should be. Those who Ms. Garson interviews span various demographic groups and have been impacted by the Great Recession. She traveled extensively across the country using her business and journalistic connections to find people affected by the housing crisis, who were unemployed or underemployed, who lost all their savings, who were seemingly in a state of shock that this had happened to hardworking, educated, middle class people like them. Without their stories, there wouldn’t be a book.

So, I certainly didn’t mind any of the profiles which are supported by statistics. I deeply understand the situations of almost every person in this book (except for the last few mentioned toward the end, who had pre-Recession wealth in the millions).

However.

The reasons I related so well to this book are the same reasons why I had a really hard time with it.

Allow me to explain.

Down the Up Escalator has a very detached feeling in the personal stories. I struggled with this, because it wasn’t the stories themselves that were the problem. As I said, I could relate to them and the people behind them all too well. Instead, I think it’s this:

As a reader and as someone walking in the well-worn shoes of the people profiled in the book, the conversational, hey-let’s-have-lunch-and-chat-about-how-you’re-coping-with-the-recession interview format simply doesn’t work for me in Down the Up Escalator. I didn’t feel a single connection between the author and any of the people she interviewed, not even a GI that she met in a coffeehouse during the Vietnam War and reconnected with sporadically during the decades thereafter.

What Down the Up Escalator needed was a different structure, one with the focus more on the INDIVIDUALS and less on the verbal exchange between the author and subject. Because as it is, the result is way too much dialogue and interactions like these: (the “I” in the passages below is the author recounting her conversation with her interviewee):

“I wrecked Elaine’s mood by asking her to describe what happened on the day she was fired.

‘The word is not ‘fired!’

‘I’m sorry, I just meant …’

‘Someone is fired when they do something bad. I was laid off because they found a computer program to do the invoicing.’

I apologized, stammering that to me a layoff meant something temporary, like a seasonal layoff at a factory. If they weren’t going to call you back, then ‘layoff’ was a euphemism.

Feldman explained the term’s functional significance for him. ‘Laid off’ means you can still collect your severance and unemployment. You didn’t get fired for cause.’ (pg. 19)

and this:

“But bright, educated, unemployed people will surely drift into some kind of work eventually – won’t they?….At the rate at which full-time staff jobs are being phased out, the older long-term unemployed of this recession probably have less than a fifty-fifty chance of finding permanent, full-time jobs. But that’s statistics. All any individual needs is one job. (pg. 46)

…for all my intellectual grasp of the downward trends for American workers, I just can’t believe that these four generous/selfish, mellow/excitable, unique/ordinary, and highly employable individuals will simply remain the long-term unemployed. Even though they might.” (pg. 47)

and this, in a conversation with a guy unemployed for five months:

“‘Maybe something more interesting than banking might turn up in one of those businesses,’ I suggested. ‘Down the line, I mean, as the economy recovers. Why not put feelers out?’

That got no response.

‘Or what about teaching?’ I asked. ‘You seem to be good with children.’

Then I thought about all the teachers being laid off. What a stupid suggestion.” (pg. 103)

and this conversation, which comes across as somewhat patronizing, with a woman describing the frustration of trying to get through to her mortgage company on the phone:

“I was taking an Access-a-Ride back and forth to Manhattan, sometimes traveling four hours a day. Then you get home and call Ocwen, and it says, ‘The waiting time will be an hour and a half.’

‘They actually said an hour and a half?’ I asked dubiously.

‘Do you remember that, Samuel? They would say, ‘Waiting time two hours,’ ‘Waiting time two hours forty minutes.’ So you take your food upstairs and you sit on the phone after work; you sit on the weekends. I called for months and they would put me in a queue.’

‘You must have gotten through to somebody, sometime?’ I said.” (pg.132)

and finally, this, to talk-Internet radio show celebrity Richard Bey (my Philadelphia friends will remember him from “People Are Talking” back in the mid-80s) who lost all of his savings in a Madoff-type investment fund.

“Richard,” I couldn’t help asking, “didn’t you ever think of the risk of having all your money in one fund?”

“Yes, Barbara, I did think about it,” he said in answer to my annoying question.(pg. 239)

There’s obviously a disconnect here. The author simply appears to be trying too hard to empathize with those she’s interviewing. And it backfires, which erodes the book’s credibility.

Because if you haven’t tried (or desperately needed) to sell your underwater house as your personal housing bubble was being popped by anonymous fat-cat bankers, and if you haven’t sat across from an interviewer and had to answer why you left your last position that you were laid off from and then answer the follow up question of what you’ve been doing in the six or nine or twelve months since, I think you can’t really empathize and understand what that is like for someone who has.

I listened to most of Down the Up Escalator on audio. While Jeanine Klein seems to be a fine narrator, there was just … a tone to this that rubbed me the wrong way. I then went back and read many of the interview portions (including those above) that I had difficulty with. I had the same reaction each time. I’m not sure whether it was the nuances in the audio narration or the actual words in print, or my coming at this from a personal place, but I had the same bristling reaction every single time.

Let’s go back to the quote that opened this review: “In the course of this recession millions more of us have slipped into that no place. Most of us will still manage to eat and keep our televisions connected. But it can’t be pleasant to live in a country whose elite have no regular use for us.”

This is contradictory. We never get a sense in Down the Up Escalator of how the recession has personally impacted the author – which is fine because this isn’t a memoir. But because that’s missing, the empathy is lost. One runs the risk of appearing elitist when making statements like “It can’t be pleasant to live in a country whose elite have no regular use for us.”

No, it isn’t. It isn’t pleasant. IT FREAKING SUCKS.

We all have that friend, the one who means well but somehow always says the wrong damn thing. And that’s the impression I was left with from Down the Up Escalator. In no way, shape, or form, is this a feel-good book about our country’s economic future. It’s depressing as hell.

Perhaps there’s no better symbolism of that then the To Be Continued … portion of the book.

“I can’t quite bring myself to leave people I got to know personally – not to mention millions of others – in such distress. So I’ve created a Web site that we might call the ongoing book about the ongoing recession.

A book eventually gets printed. But no deadline stops me from getting back to individuals to find out how they’re getting along. Their updates, taken together, may also give us some idea how the country is getting along.

You can catch up with the folks you met in these pages at www.downtheupescalator.com.”

Except … well, you kind of CAN’T.

Because there ISN’T a website.

The link is broken. But, supposedly it’s coming soon. We’re to stay tuned.

Just like, I suppose, we’re still waiting for the end of the Great Recession that supposedly was over a few years ago.

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Down the Up Escalator belongs on the bookshelf next to Nickled and Dimed, which is Barbara Ehrenreich's powerful and insightful book on the lives of working people. However, Garson is a more scholarly writer with better ethnographic skills than Barbara Ehrenreich. The premise of the book is an exploration of how ordinary people were effected by the Great Recession of 2008, caused by "widespread failures in financial regulation, including the Federal Reserve’s failure to stem the tide of toxic mortgages. Dramatic breakdowns in corporate governance including too many financial firms acting recklessly and taking on too much risk." (U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission)

First, Garson describes interviews 4 residents of New York City, who lost their jobs despite having excellent qualifications and many years of excellent job performance. After 2 years none of the were able to find jobs and wound up using their retirement savings for everyday living expenses.

Shifting to unemployed workers in the Midwest, Garson describes an interview with a conservative middle-aged Indiana man whose Big Box store employers abused him to get him to retire but he put up with it because he thought his firing was “God’s will.”

In the next section Garson changed her focus from job loss to housing loss. She tells a thorough story of a black woman’s heartbreaking battle with a loan company trying to foreclose her house. The woman was able to keep it only by borrowing on the capital in her pension and taking in 3 roomers. In this section was another story about 2 teachers who bought a house in DC that lost 2/3 of its value in the recession, so they had to pay $3000 a month in addition to expenses for their new residence in Minnesota. The section ends with a heartbreaking explanation of how banks screwed people who made their mortgage payments but negotiated with people who stopped paying. Garson showed how banks deliberately misled people even when the government was paying them to renegotiate mortgages.

It wasn't fun revisiting the Great Recession of 2008, which seems like ancient history even though it was only 9 years ago. We know that the economic recovery since then has been steady but slow. More people have jobs now but wages have not increased much at all. This book is very helpful in understanding the growing economic inequality of our current times.

[Hussam Al Husseini · Rating 3 out of 5]

The importance of the book lies in knowing how Americans were coping with the Recession that hit in 2008.

The cause might have started in the 1970s for many reaons:
1. Wages did not rise with productivity
"Between 1971 and 2007, U.S. productivity increased by 99 percent … Over the same years hourly wages rose by 4 percent." So this situation brings a question to light: "if the majority of Americans was earning less and producing more, who was going to buy all the stuff?"
Companies and corporations were lending their workers the money to buy the stuff, instead of paying them more. "Corporations that did not become banks themselves deposited their profits in outside banks or returned them to shareholders who did the same." This means that instead of sharing the productivity growth with consumers, most of the new wealth went to 1 percent, leaving the other 99 percent unable to buy what they produce. "Starting around in the mid-1970s, the wealth gap widened while hourly wages stagnated or declined."

2. Profitability in the U.S. was affected mainly by "the oil price of 1973 and competition from newly rebuilt Germany and Japan."

The economy would recover when the banks in the U.S. stop focusing on generating money and lend to "real businesses for productive purposes."

Garson investigated the impact of the Great Recession on American’s jobs, homes, and savings. And it was not good. Lots of people lost their jobs. Of those who still were allowed to keep it, most of them were shifted to become part-timers as their companies wanted to save money. After two years of the recession, she interviewed one person who found a permanent, full-time job!

The Recession affects different cities with different magnitude with California being the epicenter of the housing price bubble. During the boom years, "people think of their house more as an investment than a home."

One of the people she interviewed said the following: "If anything would drive people to socialism, it should be what is going on in [the U.S.] right now … what we have now is the law of the jungle. The lion eats everybody because he can." I agree with him.

[Alex Peck · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author is in a video I use for Econ, so I decided to check out her book. If you're looking to understand the impact of the Great Recession and not in a The Big Short kinda way, I highly recommend the book. Although it's pretty depressing.

[Caren · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an up-close-and-personal look at how the recent economic hard times have affected ordinary Americans. The author has done a wonderful job of introducing us to real people and their stories. She has changed their names, but assures us these people are not composite characters, but real people and real stories. The book delves into three aspects of difficulties recent years have brought so many of us: job loss, foreclosures, and loss of savings. If you look at those three areas, you realize that it sums up every way in which the 99% of us have suffered some financial loss. For so many of the people in these stories, their misfortunes were a matter of bad timing or bad luck. These are not dishonest people; they are hard working Americans caught up in the realities of the downturn. In the first section, she introduces us to the "Pink Slip Club" , a group of middle-aged, middle class New Yorkers who lost their jobs. She has put together a web site for us to continue to follow their stories: http://downtheupescalator.com/
Working in a library, as I do, the following section (from pages 102-103) hit home:
[Russell, the speaker here, is an unemployed bank loan officer in his late forties.]
"My father was retired eighteen years before he died. He only got fragile toward the end. When I visited, we'd argue. Or let's say, we'd leave the discussion with an open point. He would say he'd look it up in the library. But one time I said, 'Wait, I'll Google it.'
"My wife gave me hell on the way home. Why was I taking away a trip to the library--a day with purpose? After that I always tried to leave him with a couple of things to research. He'd call back with the information, and I thanked him. When he couldn't go to the library anymore, I got him a computer, but he couldn't make the leap.
"My father was a very intelligent man. He handled complicated flow problems they have computer programs for now. But eventually his idea of something to do for the day was to organize his pill case for the week. He was grateful if my mother gave him a job like going through the sock drawer and throwing out singles. Shit, is my wife doing that for me?
"Not knowing what I'm supposed to be doing the next day is the worst part of being unemployed. If I have one significant task that I can check off in the day, like researching before a job interview or writing the thank-you note after--that is much harder than it sounds--then I feel okay."
Of late Russell has been using library computers for his job search. "At first it was embarrassing to admit to myself that I really wanted the walk and the other people around me. I said I needed to go to the library to keep up with various publications and I can't afford to buy them all anymore. But now I admit I just like going to the library. It's more like going to an office. I work in a more concentrated way there."
Russell had been unemployed for five months at that point, he'd been in a backwater of banking, and he was almost fifty. Statistically, things looked bad. But he was a likable man. That was his strong point....
[end quote]
The book is full of likable people, like Russell, and it is heartbreaking. This recession supposedly ended in 2009. Ended for whom? As the author says in her conclusion, "Corporate profits were 25-30 percent higher at the official end of the Great Recession than before its onset. Meanwhile, wages as a share of national income fell to 58 percent. That's the lowest the wage share of income has been since it began to be recorded after World War II." (p. 264).
This book introduces the reader to real people and their lives. It's a wonderful piece of reporting. Although it may not be pleasant to consider its subject matter, I think it is important that we face into our troubles in this country with clear eyes and not look away.

[Ginny Dodge · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the first books I've read by a journalist. I am trying to explore genres I haven't previously tried out and I found myself pretty engaged to the characters presented and the voice of the author. I thought Barbara had a great way of humanizing her subjects even though she was using fake names and businesses. Overall, I thought this was a pretty sad book. We've found that while "down is an unAmerican direction", we have certainly stagnated when is comes to in country manufacturing, housing markets, minimum wage and the possibility of climbing the corporate ladder. I find myself in the lower middle class with quite a bit of student loan debt to pay off. Though I lived through the Great Recession of 2007-2009 I was in high school and couldn't quite grasp how this effected me. Now I see how my job, though full time, doesn't have benefits. My trade does not have a union, which probably further limits my fight for fair and higher wages. I was impressed with the variety of characters portrayed throughout the book. Not only did Garson interview those who lost their jobs in NYC related to the fall of the Lehman Brothers, but she traces the veins of small towns drying up, younger generations embracing a culture they are unlikely to bounce out of. She interviewed rich Americans who had to dip into capital, a previously unknown and probably frightening concept for them. Credit cards as crutches, mortgages on mortgages, unemployment lasting longer than 90 weeks, the list goes on. I was impressed by the thorough job Garson laid out for her readers. I may look into her other books. While this read left me feeling a bit helpless at my situation, it help me come to terms with the history of why our economy has come to this point and what might be on the horizon. I highly recommend it.

[Denise · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 2008 America suffered through the bursting of a real estate bubble that devastated its citizens and the economy. The stock market went into free fall, corporations began laying off workers by the thousands and homes and retirement portfolios saw their values drop. Panic spread throughout the country as similar reports streamed in from countries around the world. Individuals who had a job and equity in their homes on Monday would find themselves with no job by Friday and a home worth less in value than what they owed to the bank. But what happened to the people affected by this rapid change? Devastation and a reminder that most Americans are just a few paychecks away from ruin.

Barbara Garson has collected stories of some of these people and assembled them in this book. Young people in New York City who lost their jobs but still managed to keep a positive attitude about their futures...for awhile. Middle aged workers who discovered that being over fifty was not a good thing in a job market with millions unemployed. And senior citizens who lost homes they'd lived in for decades. The author relates these stories in the style of a neutral news reporter. But there are some that truly break her heart.

This is a book that peels back the financial pages and shows the human misery created by Wall Street speculation. Misery that could very well happen again and again because the actions that created this disaster are still being done!

[Ben · Rating 2 out of 5]

Stupid computer ate my first review so keeping this short.

On the one hand, it does a nice job of avoiding any stories that feel overly repetitive or cliched about what happened to people in the recession. This helps give a greater sense of depth about what was going on.

At the same time, the focus on solidly middle class people means that the most damaging parts of the recession are not really visible. A lot of the people profiled had some degree of assets or employment before the crash, so while they end up doing things like liquidating savings and severe budget cutbacks, only one of them is actually homeless. For a lot of them you get the sense that a longer time window is probably going to make the situation look worse, as the struggles that began here will keep going for years and decades. This seems especially true for the mostly middle-aged people that Gerson interviews. Also missing are medical catastrophes, which seem like in so many cases to be the ultimate source of the greatest problems for people.

Why only two stars? Some of the stories felt like she was injecting too much of herself into the story. And some just didn't come together as much as a coherent story, even without knowing the end.

[Gloria · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you have been directly affected by a job loss and/or financial stress during the recession that began in 2008, read this book. If you simply want to better understand the issues that continue to affect others experiencing unemployment and housing issues, read this book. Barbara Garson helps us understand what happened with lenders, bailouts, short sales, loan modifications, changing labor needs, young and older workers, outsourcing, the greedy and the naive, and more. Perhaps that sounds boring or overwhelming, but she does a great job of putting the personal face to the issues facing middle-class and poor Americans. It may make you angry or sad though she tends to rely on statistics to make you feel that way. She provides important culture changes occurring such as delayed retirements, highly educated young people working part-time at low wages, and changing corporate labor practices that harm workers. It is disturbing, but important to grasp. Not difficult to read, but if the numbers slow you down, skim them and proceed to the important messages within each chapter.

[Nigel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent, deeply personal look at the lives affected and undone (and in some cases untouched) by the recent financial upheavals, that acts as a necessary counterbalance to the more flashy and/or technical accounts of high level banking and housing shenanigans I've read over the last few years. Will probably be overshadowed by George Packer's THE UNWINDING, but still recommended.

(Note that it's not so much a book about poverty in the USA - as Garson point out, most of the people she interviews are still buying coffee at Starbucks - as about the decline of middle class expectations, how we've come to accept, with little protest, that most of us are going to be worse than we expected to be a decade or so ago, maybe even worse off than our parents. Those weak milky drinks are small consolation for instability and any kind of faith in the future.)

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

I couldn't put this book down. It puts in plain, understandable terms (rare these days) the mortgage crisis issues and all the other aspects of our economy and how we got there - often pointing out things I'd noticed, but hadn't associated them as part of the reason. It shows what REAL people have been doing to cope and the change in attitudes and plans they needed to do so. It tells it through people on many sides of the issues.

I can't say this book is uplifting - with this economy it just isn't possible - but it puts it all in perspective. BUT understanding what you are dealing with in the here and now - not banking on what has gone on before or what "experts" predict - helps you decide what tools you need to survive.

It is not a difficult read and you walk away with not only a deeper understanding, but realizing you are not the only one having those kind of difficulties.

[Nicole Schwenkbeck · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The companies that wrote us off as workers now write us off as consumers. If you're not a worker, not a consumer, and you don't earn significant income from investments, then you don't have much of a place in capitalist society. In the course of this recession millions more of us have slipped into that no place. Most of us will still manage to eat and keep our televisions connected. But it can't be pleasant to live in a country whose elite have no regular use for us."
Barbara Garson
Down the Up Escalator

[Scott Schneider · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many years ago I read Barbara Garson's All the Livelong Day and loved it so I was excited to see a new book from her. I even went to an event with her at the AFL last month. This book interviews and tells personal stories of people affected by the Great Recession. It includes both old and young, rich and poor people. As such it documents the widespread destruction of the recession. But it is ultimately a pretty depressing read. Very few make it past their financial troubles. It doesn't give one much, if any, hope. Maybe that can be the sequel once we finally get out of this mess.

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this book makes me want to throw it across the room and kick it a bit. The stories are infuriating, stressful, and aggravating, while simultaneously demonstrating the resilience and persistence of those who are convinced that hard work will pull them out of a ruined economy. Definitely not a fun read, but interesting to get some perspective on what else was happening during the years right after I graduated and was looking for work.

[Dar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yet another economics book! I recommend this one because the personal stories are gripping and they are backed up by an overview of trends in the 20th century. It has a journalistic tone, like reading magazine articles, so it's very accessible. The overarching theme is that while individuals can be blamed for their financial choices, they were also victims of societal forces that were hard to avoid.

[Luke Winders · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was all fairly interesting but it gets the boost to 4 stars from 3 for the middle section on all the housing bullshit I was peripherally and slackerishly involved in for the last 5 years. Solano County is well represented with the woeful tale of a downtown Benicia condo and a sad depiction of good old Vallejo. Rep the V!

[Connie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Barbara Garson makes an interesting case for the recession starting much sooner than we might think-policies from the Regan era are being felt today.
She tells the story from a "social history" point of view-we see the effects of fiscal and monetary policy through the eyes of those affected.
It makes for a very compelling read.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absorbing non-fiction, and a look into how the majority of people fared during the great recession. The author points out that the middle class has been losing ground for years, and uses examples to highlight this. Not academic at all, and easily readable. For anyone interested in reading non-fiction sociology that pertains to work.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was drawn to this book because of my own experiences throughout this recession. I knew I wasn't unique but still wanted to hear other stories that the media was under-reporting if they bothered at all. I suppose it delivers some sort of comfort to read others trials and tribulations. I did enjoy the book.

[Ang · Rating 4 out of 5]

Holy crap, this book is depressing. But one of the things that really comes through is the (sometimes stupid) resilience of Americans. And that's not a bad thing to read about.

But I do feel, after reading it, utterly hopeless. So you know, read at your own risk.

[Lynn Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very quick read. It is very anecdotal about individuals and how they survived the recession. Pretty depressing.... as there doesnt really seem to be an upturn. Just the rich are getting richer and the poor...... we...

[Tim Suddeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Garson interviews people from different walks of life whose jobs, homes or investments were affected by the recession. Very true and interesting to see how people have accepted the changes they have endured. Good case studies but not very encouraging. Well written.

[Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely worthy. It opened my eyes a few times.

[Karolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such an interesting and truthful outline of what is happening to Americans and our wealth. I would highly recommend it.

[Sarah Ewald · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sobering look at the recession.

[Mike Stolfi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written in a readable style, another great book about the continuing decline of the social contract & why it will probably matter to you soon, if you're not bothered by these things already.