Another Sort of Life

Spurred by boredom and maybe a touch of mid-life crisis, a political scienceprofessor quits the security of academic life and with just the cash in his pocket,a worn-out station wagon and a cargo of books hits the road in search ofsomething different.

economy and the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression. Hisnew colleagues include neer-do-wells, zanies, bohemians, underachievers, andpeople temporarily or permanently down on their luck. He joins the newpoor an unprecedented class of downwardly mobile people for whom universitydegrees, diligence, and doing everything right have lost their force and hebecomes himself a misfit who cant, or wont, hang onto a job. During his travelshe makes a catch-as-catch-can living as an adjunct professor, a field worker,a department store clerk, a civil servant, a door-to-door salesman, a janitor, a carwasher, a day laborer, even a seller of blood his own.

This is a close-up view of the dark (and now largely neglected) side of the 1980s,also of a subculture which lives just below the surface of middle-class Americanlife and which shares neither in its affluence nor its aspirations. Its a fouryearstroll on the wrong side of the tracks, a tale reminiscent of GeorgeOrwells Down and Out in Paris and London, yet leavened with a dash of humor.