Here are 100 books that Hard Work fans have personally recommended if you like
Hard Work.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I am a retired university professor who taught creative writing at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, and a not-yet-retired author, although I have on several occasions solemnly stated that I have written my last prose book. I believe these two qualities make me competent to create a list of 5 books that I have reread the most often.
I first read this book exactly 50 years ago, back in 1974, when I was 26. Ever since then, I have reread Jaroslav Hašek's masterpiece every single year, always in February. It is the gloomiest month of the year in Europe when our tonus is at its lowest, and we desperately need something to cheer us up.
The hilarious story of the good soldier is precisely that “injection” of optimism, serenity, élan vital that helps me make it through the last winter months till the arrival of the Spring. Although I already know by heart many passages from Svejk, I still laugh aloud while reading them—reading about the instinctive wisdom of an ordinary, small Czech man trying to comically outsmart the demonic forces of History…
The inspiration for such works as Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Jaroslav Hasek's black satire The Good Soldier Svejk is translated with an introduction by Cecil Parrott in Penguin Classics.
Good-natured and garrulous, Svejk becomes the Austro-Hungarian army's most loyal Czech soldier when he is called up on the outbreak of the First World War - although his bumbling attempts to get to the front serve only to prevent him from reaching it. Playing cards, getting drunk and becoming a general nuisance, the resourceful Svejk uses all his natural cunning and genial subterfuge to deal with the doctors, police, clergy and officers…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I am passionate about integrating individual, organizational, and community needs to create a better world for the benefit of us all. I am an author and founder of organizations in the career and workforce development fields. My four books (Affiliation in the Workplace, Building Workforce Strength, Business Behaving Well, and How to Build a Nontraditional Career Path) and much of my career explored bringing work to life for those close to us, for ourselves, for our organizations, and for our communities. My social activism has been expressed through community volunteer work and promoting a range of social causes. I hope you enjoy the books I have chosen for you!
Some books reach me on an emotional level, while with others, it is in their intellectual reach and research rigor. This book is of the latter kind.
I was captivated by the breadth of ideas presented and the depth of research involved. It affirmed for me the dangerous trajectory of growing financial inequality that is unfolding and why that is important. This book is a monumental work.
A New York Times #1 Bestseller An Amazon #1 Bestseller A Wall Street Journal #1 Bestseller A USA Today Bestseller A Sunday Times Bestseller A Guardian Best Book of the 21st Century Winner of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award Winner of the British Academy Medal Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award
What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard…
I am the Director of the High Pay Centre, a London-based think tank researching the causes and consequences of economic inequality. In most major economies, the richest 1% of the population now take up to a fifth of all income and something like a quarter to a third of all wealth. These rich jerks aren’t necessarily bad people, at least not in all cases, and we don’t literally need to eat them all. However, such extreme concentration of income and wealth is undeserved and unnecessary, and it should definitely be an overriding priority to share it in a fairer and more even way.
After the UK Miners’ Strike was defeated in 1984, the coal mining industry across the country gradually shut down. At the Tower Colliery in South Wales, however, Miners led by Union official Tyrone O’Sullivan used their redundancy cheques to buy the mine and run it as a co-operative until the coal ran out.
It’s an incredible tale of the spirit and ingenuity that exist but are too rarely nurtured in post-industrial communities and of how badly so many mining towns in Britain were let down by so-called free market economics.
Tyronne O'Sullivan is the chairman of Tower Colliery, Hirwaun, South Wales. He led the team of miners that fought to buy the pit from British Coal in 1995. He and 238 miners each paid 8,000 from their own redundancy settlement to become shareholders and borrowed a further GBP2 million. This was, and still is, a unique achievement - no other mine, in the history of British Coal, has been bought by the workforce. For over 20 years Tyronne was the National Union of mineworkers branch secretary, leading a radical group of men in what had to be a militant colliery.…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I am the Director of the High Pay Centre, a London-based think tank researching the causes and consequences of economic inequality. In most major economies, the richest 1% of the population now take up to a fifth of all income and something like a quarter to a third of all wealth. These rich jerks aren’t necessarily bad people, at least not in all cases, and we don’t literally need to eat them all. However, such extreme concentration of income and wealth is undeserved and unnecessary, and it should definitely be an overriding priority to share it in a fairer and more even way.
This thought-provoking academic text outlines how corporate power and the super-rich have almost become governing institutes in their own right through funding of political parties, control of the media, and the platforms they enjoy as outsized economic actors.
It perhaps lends itself to undue pessimism about the possibility of change but is certainly powerful evidence of the need for a rebalancing of the distribution of wealth and power.
In Post-Democracy (Polity, 2004) Colin Crouch argued that behind the facade of strong institutions, democracy in many advanced societies was being hollowed out, its big events becoming empty rituals as power passed increasingly to circles of wealthy business elites and an ever-more isolated political class.
Crouch's provocative argument has in many ways been vindicated by recent events, but these have also highlighted some weaknesses of the original thesis and shown that the situation today is even worse. The global financial deregulation that was the jewel in the crown of wealthy elite lobbying brought us the financial crisis and helped stimulate…
I am a journalist with a background in performing arts and have spent much of my work life as a storyteller, fascinated by the process of knocking a narrative into shape, either for print or stage performance. My mother’s death prompted me to use those same skills to tell my own stories and the process has been the most satisfying of my professional life. As a memoirist of two books, my dreams have come true. My work has been shortlisted for awards, featured in national newspapers, special interest magazines, and by the BBC. I regularly speak to family history societies, book clubs, writer’s groups, and at literature festivals.
The author’s account of grinding, unrelentless poverty and neglect, set against her eventual, miraculous escape to a different life made me cheer.
Bravely, Kerry Hudson returns to the scenes of many crimes committed against her to really understand why the past refuses to let her go and whether anything has changed for deprived families in those rundown British towns she grew up in.
In an early chapter the author recalls being pushed between two adults across a table. She thought it was a game, but her parents were in fact arguing over who should keep her. Neither was willing.
This is an important and shameful piece of British social history and an unflinching examination of a dysfunctional family with different recollections of the past.
'Totally engrossing and deliciously feisty' Bernardine Evaristo
A powerful, personal agenda-changing exploration of poverty in today's Britain.
'When every day of your life you have been told you have nothing of value to offer, that you are worth nothing to society, can you ever escape that sense of being 'lowborn' no matter how far you've come?'
Kerry Hudson is proudly working class but she was never proudly poor. The poverty she grew up in was all-encompassing, grinding and often dehumanising. Always on the move with her single mother, Kerry attended nine primary schools and five secondaries, living in B&Bs and…
I am an award-winning author of two five-star rated memoirs, and the creator/performer of the 90-minute solo show My Whorizontal Life: The Show!. I'm co-host of the podcast My Index to Sex, and I am a Juilliard Drama Graduate and the former #1 escort in the country. My desire in writing about the secret work of love and pleasure is first to create unexpected delight by leading the reader or audience into the surprisingly fascinating, funny, wild, misunderstood, and imagined life underground where so many women secretly work. Through my writing, I hope to give an authentic voice, knowledgeable, true, and uncynical to this experience.
I read this book when it was first published when working low-wage ‘regular’ jobs was something I feared. I had been poor for so long and worked low-wage regular jobs before and through 9 years of college and after until I became an escort. As much as being an escort was shamed, it was nothing compared to the shame of not being able to survive with two low-wage jobs that eat up all your time, your choices, and your health. Then here was this powerful, insightful book.
The author is a journalist who goes underground, takes these jobs, and tries to survive. What is revealed are the lives of so much of the population in America that are working this way. I read this book in one day. Once you see it and have felt it, it’s impossible not to see it and want better for all of us.
Beautifully repackaged as part of the Picador Modern Classics Series, this special edition is small enough to fit in your pocket and bold enough to stand out on your bookshelf.
A publishing phenomenon when first published, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed is a revelatory undercover investigation into life and survival in low-wage America, an increasingly urgent topic that continues to resonate.
Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job―any job―can be the ticket…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I grew up in New York City listening to my parents’ stories of extreme hardship and suffering during the Nazi occupation of their native Greece—and the courageous resistance they and many Greeks mounted. I’m outraged by the unfairness of extreme poverty in the midst of plenty and motivated to fight for economic justice. In the early 1980s, as homelessness was first becoming a crisis, I got involved in legal advocacy to address it, first as a volunteer lawyer and then as a full-time advocate. I believe housing is a human right and that no one should be homeless in a country as rich as the US.
I loved this book, even as it made me so angry at the way this country treats workers who are, in fact, essential. I read it years ago, before I met and got to know its author, and was immediately swept up by its remarkable but very simple premise: entering incognito into low-wage working life in communities across the country—and writing about it.
I was fascinated by this raw, behind-the-scenes look at the ugly underside of restaurants, hotels, and big box stores, among other staples of American life. I was engaged by the author’s authentic and distinctive voice. I felt like I was listening to a friend recount, in detail, her visit to a strange yet also familiar land.
In this now classic work, Barbara Ehrenreich, our sharpest and most original social critic, goes "undercover" as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of American prosperity.
Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job―any job―can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour?
To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever…
I don’t know how much of who we are is determined by genetics, and how much is from the environment, but I enjoy using characters and stories to explore the question. My scientific and medical background allows me to pull from my training, clinical patients, and scientific studies to create stories that explore characters who are at the precipice of a problem and need to fight against their inner beliefs to learn who they truly are. It’s like a chess game, moving the pieces around the board to see which side will win!
This novel took much of America by storm, and I am no different.
I love the voice of Demon Copperhead, which bleeds from the Appalachian Mountains. He has endured more trauma over his early years than most people do in several lifetimes. I think what’s most endearing about this novel is that it is sadly believable. Demon is a boy whose local environment has doomed him before he took his first breath. He’s the kind of boy who is just hoping for a break, and as the reader, all I wanted to do was adopt him and give him a good home.
And of course, it did win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, so that probably means something!
Demon's story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking 'like a little blue prizefighter.' For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.
In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn't an idea, it's as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn't an abstraction, it's neighbours, parents, and friends. 'Family' could mean love, or reluctant foster…
I work in the venture capital (finance) space but have a long-time passion for and involvement with charity and philanthropy work, having founded several non-profits including most recently Lever Foundation which works to create a more humane and sustainable food system in Asia. I’m a big believer in and advocate for applying quantitative, analytical thinking and an outcome-focused mindset to efforts to make the world a better place. It’s something I think about every day, and it’s what I write about as well.
Peter Singer has been called “the most influential living philosopher”, and his writing certainly influenced the trajectory of my own life (including leading me to care a lot about the excruciating suffering that farm animals and other animals are made to endure).
He has a lot of good books, but this one drives home, in a very simple and down-to-earth fashion, how you and I can literally save lives.
For the first time in history, eradicating world poverty is within our reach. Yet around the world, a billion people struggle to live each day on less than many of us pay for bottled water. In The Life You Can Save, Peter Singer uses ethical arguments, illuminating examples, and case studies of charitable giving to show that our current response to world poverty is not only insufficient but morally indefensible. The Life You Can Save teaches us to be a part of the solution, helping others as we help ourselves.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I’ve become fascinated with the unconventional tumultuous world of the 1920s ever since I discovered my grandmother’s box of mementos that led to my debut historical fiction, Whistling Women and Crowing Hens. The lesser-known parts of our country’s history draw me in, and the potential for strong female characters keeps me writing. Before I fell down many research rabbit holes, I thought the 1920s were just speakeasies, fringed flappers, and bathtub gin—while entertaining, it’s only the “big city” side of this transformative decade. I’ve found I prefer reading what everyday townspeople experienced, or how “normal” women became unexpected heroes, or ways people persevered after the turmoil WWI caused. There are so many undiscovered stories to be told!
Each time I read this American classic, it changes in meaning and relevance.
Told from Francie’s point of view, it’s a family’s coming-of-age story about overcoming personal and societal choices in order to persevere and grow, just like the tree in the title. Smith is one of the first authors to write about the real, human struggles of working-class Americans at the start of the 20th century.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is not a light, whimsical read but it’s one that sticks with me. I relate to Francie, a vulnerable, observant young woman who uses her writing as a way to process, explore, and eventually propel her into a different life, away from the trauma and poverty of her beloved Brooklyn.
This book is one that everyone needs to read and that I find myself going back to again and again.
A special 75th anniversary edition of the beloved American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the twentieth century.
From the moment she entered the world, Francie Nolan needed to be made of stern stuff, for growing up in the Williamsburg slums of Brooklyn, New York demanded fortitude, precocity, and strength of spirit. Often scorned by neighbors for her family’s erratic and eccentric behavior―such as her father Johnny’s taste for alcohol and Aunt Sissy’s habit of marrying serially without the formality of divorce―no one, least of all Francie, could…
