Book cover of American Grunt: Ridiculous Stories of a Life Lived at $8.00 an Hour

Book description

Working dead-end blue-collar jobs your whole life can take a dramatic physical and emotional toll-unless you learn to embrace the absurdity.

Kevin Cramer has almost died at work three separate times, surviving each incident only through a minor miracle. It got him asking the question-why? Why do so many of…

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Why read it?

1 author picked American Grunt as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

American Grunt is for anyone who’s ever worked a shitty manual labor job for minimum wage (i.e., most of America).

As a kind of literary outsider, Cramer – who narrates with a forceful, friendly humor, as if he’s got his arm around the reader’s shoulder – writes compellingly about his decades on construction sites and in warehouses and behind the wheels of delivery trucks. Life, that is, as a grunt.

There aren’t many writers out there who can articulate the absurdity of such a life… a life at the intersections of poverty, danger, apathy, and frustration. Cramer’s one of them.…

If you love American Grunt...

Book cover of These Blue Mountains

These Blue Mountains by Sarah Loudin Thomas,

A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.

German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…

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