Down the Up Escalator

Starred review from November 19, 2012
Americans cope with the fallout from 40 years of dwindling prospects in this quietly harrowing mosaic of economic decline. Journalist Garson (All the Livelong Day) focuses on the basics—jobs, homes, money—and the people who have lost them since the 2008 financial crisis: a group of middle-aged New Yorkers who comfort each other as their layoffs turn into long-term unemployment; California homeowners, some facing immediate eviction, while others cynically game the foreclosure system; elderly pensioners who suddenly find their nest eggs crushed. Through their stories, she weaves lucid explanations of the mortgage bubble and financial speculations that wrecked the system, situating them within a larger analysis of the generations-long post-Vietnam economic transformation that replaced middle-class jobs with low-paid contingent labor, widened the gulf between the rich and the rest, and forced workers to take on ever more debt to keep their heads above water. Garson’s vivid, shrewd, warmly sympathetic profiles show the resilience with which ordinary Americans respond to misfortune, but also the enduring costs as they abandon hopes for a fulfilling career, an extra child, or a secure retirement. The result is a compelling portrait of an economy that has turned against the people. Agent: Joy Harris, the Joy Harris Literary Agency.

February 1, 2013
How the economic recession is reshaping peoples' lives and prospects. Garson (Money Makes the World Go Around: One Investor Tracks Her Cash Through the Global Economy from Brooklyn to Bangkok and Back, 2001, etc.) combines her skills as a dramatist with her activist's conscience in this study of the economic issues confronting individuals and families in different parts of the country. With brutal clarity, the author shows how job categories have been redefined and wages and salaries cut, often in half, as skilled workers find themselves replaced by temps and other contingent hires working for the minimum wage. Whether it is the members of New York City's "Pink Slip Club" or graduate professionals who have joined the ranks of the long-term unemployed, Garson powerfully highlights the similarities within the differences. She also shows how the transformation to contingent, or temporary, status has affected workers in upscale services and the financial industry, including hedge funds. Interestingly, the author profiles some of the technicians whose models caused the financial crash, many of whom continued to find employment on credit default swaps and other derivative products few understand. Garson also takes up household finance and the effects of the collapsed bubble on homeowners and investors. The author traces each step of the foreclosure process through individual case studies, which allow her to identify and dramatize the pitfalls set for the unknowing and the villains preying on the unaware. She does not exclude speculators, who fell victim to their own get-rich schemes. A skillful presentation that lifts the veil too often hiding areas that should be brought to light.

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November 1, 2012

Since publication of All the Livelong Day, her 1975 classic study of the working life, Garson has been regarded as a sharp-eyed populist journalist who speaks truth to power. (You'll also recall her as the author of MacBird!, a satirical play that identified LBJ with Macbeth.) Ranging far and wide both geographically and in terms of job type, she shows how folks from unemployed bankers to factory workers just hanging on and a pink-slipped health-care worker facing eviction have been surviving a bad economy that's taking us down, down, down. A you-are-there report from the trenches in the style of Studs Terkel.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.