Jeanne Marie Laskas

What a surprise, that this book should jump off the shelves of a second-hand store and into my wife's hands. Back in the late 90s, when Laskas was writing up her transition to farm life in essays for the Washington Post Magazine on Sundays, my then-girlfriend and I would hand them back and forth, commenting on the writing, commenting on the unfolding story. And my girlfriend, a rural Ohioan at heart, would rhapsodize about chucking all our suburban life and getting a farm. And I would say show more something insensitive like "did you read the part where it says sheep are stupid?"

Flash forward to 2013. My girlfriend is now my wife, and we live on a 2-acre spread in a little town in Ohio. Running into Laskas after all these years, then, was a little like running into an old college friend who just happens to have made some very similar choices to your own. No, a 2-acre yard is exactly nothing like a farm, and yet I fear that I recognized some of Laskas's struggles with "what am I going to do with all this space?" Moreso, I found myself shaking my head at her urbanite's missteps in rural culture, and then I found myself remembering the times I've put my foot in my mouth.

By turns funny and sad, this is an honest and well-crafted memoir. It's probably not the kind of thing which would appeal to me if I didn't recognize the author, but let me introduce you to my old friend Jeanne... she has some interesting things to say. show less

I am a football lover. A football watching fool. Specifically I am an Oregon Ducks football fanatic. After reading this excellent but heart-wrenching story about the damage done by the violence of this sport I so love, I am going to have to rethink my devotion. This book is a stellar, stop you in your tracks telling about the fraud perpetuated (and paid for) by the NFL and the courageous and heroic Dr. Bennet Omalu. The movie based upon this book is coming out at Christmas- can't wait to see show more it. This book is not to be missed. show less

I'm grateful to have received an early reader's copy of this book, and glad to have read it. The book collects a set of essays -- really, profiles of people in specific lines of work -- previously published in GQ magazine, with one from Smithsonian and two new chapters. Despite the author's (editor's?) efforts to fit the pieces under a single theme - the jobs we rely on but don't know anything about -- they read as pieces with separate origins. They take different approaches to their show more material, and choose their subjects differently. The chapter on the coal miners works as a discussion of working people doing an important but invisible job, but it's one of the few that does. The chapter on Sputter, the black woman long-distance trucker, is a fine essay, but is absolutely not about an ordinary working person in an invisible job; it's about how we bear solitude and grief and yet also reach out to form new friendships and community, and is a classic personal essay rather than a run at sociological analysis. Packaging these essays as a single exercise increases the chance that a reader misses the point and quality of several of them - it took me several days after finishing the book to understand what I'd actually read.

One recurring frustration: the author writes as an upper-middle class coastal liberal for a similar audience. It's not that she's patronizing - she works hard to avoid presenting her subjects as quaint -- but virtually every chapter includes a moment, or a series of moments, where she says something from a parochial perspective and her subjects look at her as though she's just arrived from another planet and they have to patiently explain how life actually works. That gimmick gets old. It's also beside the point: what makes these essays stick is not the portrayal of subcultures, but the glimpses of discrete individuals coping with brokenness and human limits in down-to-earth and humanizing ways. In that light, the best and most moving of the chapters is the one about a team of roughnecks on a frozen oil rig six miles off Alaska's North Slope, and especially their tool-pusher TooDogs. show less

After reading Concussion - well, for one thing, I think the NFL is pretty damn criminal. And I like football. And I live in Pittsburgh, where people REALLY like football.

Jeanne Marie Laskas made me feel extremely attached to Mike Webster, and to all the other players who have suffered like he suffered. Not to mention the families of those players, the friends, the people who tried to help them and couldn't. This was an amazing book, non-fiction that read like fiction, and I couldn't put it show more down.

And now I don't know if I can watch football without worrying about who will be next. The 'concussion protocol' is nice, but it doesn't come close to addressing the repeated non-concussive hits those players take, game after game, practice after practice. There aren't many football fans who are in favor of making the game safer. They all need to read this book.

Oh, and my kids? NEVER EVER. show less