Change Your Worldview With These Ten Books about Work
A deep dive into nonfiction about jobs
I read a lot of nonfiction, and I tend to read it the way most people read fiction: I’m looking for an entry point into other peoples’ experiences and mindsets.
Finding good nonfiction can be a bit tricky, though; unless you’re following a favorite author or doing a deep dive into a particular area of interest, where do you start looking? In a library, you have to look for nonfiction by subject and the dreaded (or beloved, to library science types, yours truly included) Dewey Decimal System; in bookstores, you need to look in broader BISAC — Book Industry Standards and Communications — subject categories.
My time is finite, and no matter how hard-working I am, there’s only so many jobs and professions I’ll be able to work at during my lifetime. If I want the “inside look” at jobs and professions, then, it only makes sense that reading books by people in those professions would be the best way to gain such perspective. Imagine you’re looking for a book that helps you understand what other people are thinking while they do what it is they do…where do you start?
Might I suggest the ten titles listed below?
So that’s what doctors are thinking
- Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes On An Imperfect Science, by Atul Gawande
First published in 2002, this one’s a classic, but it’s every bit as readable now as it was then. Gawande is one of those (to me, anyway) disgusting people who can do anything — how do you work as a surgical resident, which he did while writing this — and also write a stunning work of nonfiction?
This honest and inside look at all aspects of medical practice, and how and why things often go wrong, will make you think differently about how to make your own health decisions. Everything Gawande writes is extremely thoughtful; his Checklist Manifesto, about how all professions (surgery particularly) have gotten so complicated that we need to set up simple, checklist systems to make sure we’re covering all the basics, is another classic.
2. Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery, by Henry Marsh
Marsh is a British neurosurgeon, and this memoir about how he basically fell into his career after an aimless start in school and work is detailed, but also wry. The odds of any of us having to undergo brain surgery are not high, but anyone dealing with aging parents, spouses, or friends, can still find much to learn here. I just happened to read this before my mother had a stroke, and being familiar with the vocabulary of brain structures and functions made me feel more prepared to discuss care options with her doctors.
This is also an eye-opening look into nationalized health care, and its benefits and challenges. It is time to seriously discuss a different health care system here, and reading books like this would help us understand what a system not strangled by health insurance interests might look like.
3. Nobody’s Home: Candid Reflections of a Nursing Home Aide, by Thomas Edward Gass (or, Victoria Sweet’s God’s Hotel)
Both of these thoughtful health care memoirs, one by an aide and the second by a doctor, point out the costs, difficulties, and sometimes even the benefits of caring for large (and growing) populations of elderly and indigent patients, and they do so with grace and understanding.
What’s going on in our country’s classrooms?
4. Getting Schooled, by Garret Keizer
Keizer began his career as a teacher but then transitioned to full-time writing. At age 47 he returned to teaching in order to get health insurance (the fact that someone can be a respected editor for publications like Harper’s Monthly and still can’t make a living at it is a powerful indictment of our current system). Filling in for a teacher at a rural Vermont high school near his home, he learned that teachers have a lot to do — and a lot of what they have to do has little to do with teaching their actual classroom lessons.
The business of America is business
When it comes to business and finance memoirs, you’re literally spoiled for choice. Any time you spend reading in this area, whether it’s memoirs/manifestos like Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In or Ashlee Vance’s Elon Musk, you will gain insight into how business movers and shakers think and plan. You won’t always agree with them — personally, I can’t stand Sheryl Sandberg — but you will learn a lot.
5. Glass House, the 1% Economy and the Shattering of an All-American Town, by Brian Alexander
If you read only one book on this list, make it this investigative book about Ohio’s Anchor Hocking Glass company. The company started as a profitable manufacturer and was destroyed (along with the city where it is headquartered) by corporate profit-taking and other shenanigans. This book explains the death of manufacturing — and good manufacturing wages — and the rise of unsustainable rates of CEO compensation.
6. Anything by Michael Lewis
Arguably Michael Lewis’s most famous book, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, is about football, but it’s really about the business of football (particularly at the high school and college level). Lewis has a talent for explaining many different aspects of the finance industry so that anyone can understand what he’s saying (even if the very word “derivative” makes you nod off), and all of his books are fascinating. Start with Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, or his other sports classic, Moneyball.
To understand or reform law enforcement, it’s time to read a little about law enforcement
7. Serpico: The Cop Who Defied the System, by Peter Maas.
This 1973 classic definitely holds up. Frank Serpico became a NYPD cop at a young age because he believed in community policing. However, after witnessing widespread corruption in the 1960s and 70s among his superiors and fellow officers, he became one of the most famous whistleblowers in American history. When he told the mayor and the press what he knew, it was so explosive that the mayor had to set up a five-person panel to investigate the problem and make reform suggestions.
Really, any book on whistleblowing (but particularly this one) makes for a great read about work, as they are typically revealing corruption and wrongdoing across a number of professions and businesses.
8. Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, by David Simon
Before he created the classic TV series The Wire, Simon was a journalist who spent a year embedded with the homicide department of the Baltimore police force. This would be a good book if Simon simply described police investigative work with his journalistic eye for detail, but he also provides context from all other aspects of the criminal “justice” system, as well as investigating Baltimore’s politics, culture, and education system as well.
Jobs, jobs, all kinds of jobs
9. Hidden America: From Coal Miners to Cowboys, an Extraordinary Exploration of the Unseen People Who Make This Country Work, by Jeanne Marie Laskas
Journalist Laskas goes right to the source and interviews a number of workers in a wide variety of necessary but often “invisible” professions. I think we’ve all learned this year how much we need meat processors and grocery store workers, so the time has never been better to read this book.
10. Gig: Americans Talk about Their Jobs, edited by John Bowe and Marisa Bowe
Published in 2008, many of the job details given in this wide-ranging oral history of work have already changed, but many more have stayed very much the same. The wide range of voices and professions here makes it an educational book, even if it is a bit dated. (It’s an update of a 1973 sociological classic, the oral history Working by Studs Terkel, which is also well worth the read, both as work commentary and American history.)
Bonus book
Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, by Sarah Smarsh
Just because. Sarah Smarsh points out that Americans like to think that if you work hard and make the right choices, you can “pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” In her personal and still comprehensively researched memoir, she explores all the societal forces that can make it impossible for somebody born into financial insecurity to ever break out of it…even if they work multiple jobs their whole lives.
Reading these books won’t make you richer or more successful. But these titles will draw your attention to important details about how the world, literally, works.
Sarah Cords is the author of Bingeworthy British Television: The Best Brit TV You Can’t Stop Watching. Fellow curmudgeons welcome at citizenreader.com.
