Publisher Description
Five hundred feet underground, Jeanne Marie Laskas asked a coal miner named Smitty, “Do you think it’s weird that people know so little about you?” He replied, “I don’t think people know too much about the way the whole damn country works.” Hidden America intends to fix that. Like John McPhee and Susan Orlean, Laskas dives deep into her subjects and emerges with character-driven narratives that are gripping, funny, and revelatory. In Hidden America, the stories are about the people who make our lives run every day—and yet we barely think of them. Laskas spent weeks in an Ohio coal mine and on an Alaskan oil rig; in a Maine migrant labor camp, a Texas beef ranch, the air traffic control tower at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, a California landfill, an Arizona gun shop, the cab of a long-haul truck in Iowa, and the stadium of the Cincinnati Ben-Gals cheerleaders. Cheerleaders? Yes. They, too, are hidden America, and you will be amazed by what Laskas tells you about them: hidden no longer.
Download and start listening now!
“Hidden America is a compilation of essays about people who work behind the scenes in America. I appreciated the casual style of the writing. I found myself thinking of the people after I was done reading their story. For this I am going to give the book 4 stars. The author, I could tell, was trying to be unbiased, an observer to their stories. Yet sometimes things slipped out, comments that made it easy to see a bias, and at times I felt she was condescending to the people she was interviewing. The stories of the migrant workers, the air traffic controllers, the coal miners, and the men on the North Slope stuck with me. The people were real and these are the people that work hard every day in jobs that just anyone can do.”
—
Tressa (4 out of 5 stars)
