I found this book really fascinating for reasons I did not expect. It is a book composed of condensed 3 or 4 page interviews with people in a fairly comprehensive range of jobs. I checked it out because I thought it might give me some guidance about types of jobs or careers that might be interesting to me. What I took away from it was more of a nuanced insight into how different people think of their work, what they like and don't like about the jobs they do, the casual, sociological knowledge t...

People talking candidly about their jobs, that's what this book is all about. Some of the interviews are a bit dated (copyright 2001), like all the people in the tech sector talking about how their businesses are taking off, but overall, the people interviewed are interesting and you get a good survey of the fundamental questions about other people's jobs--how they got into it, why they're doing it, how they feel about it, etc. The book is especially good because it covers a diverse array of car...

I picked this book up at a point when I was a little bored of the fictional characters in the novel that I was reading. Because the characters were pretty unrealistic and unrelatable, I was looking for something more authentic, more vivid, more true to life. This is a compilation of interviews of over 120 Americans talking candidly about their jobs. An insider‘s views on occupations like slaughterhouse human resources director, crime scene cleaner, palm reader etc. were very intriguing, and I wa...

This book is interesting to me on a lot of levels. It is essentially a series of interviews about what people do for a living. It may very well be the first book developed from a website; I'd be curious if anyone is aware of an earlier one. Unlike the current craze of personal memoir (blog) books, or coffee table LOLz books, this is actually very journalistic in nature. These stories seem like they were collected by audio interviews, and it's hard to imagine any website doing that today. The fac...

This book was fascinating to read - it's a bunch of people talking candidly about their jobs. Some of them are shocking, some uplifting, some downright depressing. But all of them were very interesting. My favorites were the florist (because I've always had a secret desire to be florist), the software engineer (because he had fabulous insights on the differences in lifestyle between socialist nations and capitalist ones), and the McDonald's crew member (her uplifting spirit and sense of self is

Books like this need to be required high school reading. Seriously. I would make this required Senior year reading. Everyone has to pick five(5) jobs that sound interesting, and another five(5) that would be the least interesting to them. Final project would be a short (5-10 pages) essay and what the students feel are the pros and cons of each of their choices, and maybe describe what they think a typical day might be like (for them) in their most interested and least interested career picks. Th...

This is a book of unstructured interviews with Americans, about their jobs. It is transcribed in their own words (though with all the annoying um’s and uh’s helpful edited out), so it preserves the diversity of regional accents, educational levels, and idiosyncratic speech patterns for a down-to-earth flavor. At first glance, you would think this was a book about employment, about the ways we make money. But it is really about how we live, and what we live for. The book is organized by professio...

At 700 pages, I hit a wall at 400 -- I began to bemoan how it seemed unending, though each individual story was interesting. Overall, it's a great series of vignettes stringing together a wholesome narrative of 2000's Americana. I'd love to see it revised to today's 2016, as a great deal has changed in our professional landscape, particularly in terms of AI.Gig's editors certainly had a hand to play in that "wholesome" aura -- but I continue to muse on whether it's a general human attitude towar...

I really liked this book and found out quite a lot of things about all sorts of jobs. Maybe your Walmart greeter is a retired teacher with a PhD in education (who also loves his job), maybe the finance and stock exchange specialist at a fancy firm fears getting shot like one of his colleagues, maybe the grumpy and sketchy guy selling guns in a small store is one of the most ethical folks when it comes to gun use. There are a lot of stories like this, ranging from your regular UPS delivery guy to...

Wow. This book was an Experience™. If you're like me and you love seeing a window into strangers' lives and gaining insight on the world as a whole, I definitely recommend.With the scope of professions and people interviewed, it opened my eyes to a lot of different perspectives and experiences in America and all these nuances to social issues. I live in a very liberal bubble and like many other youths of today, I'm passionate about social justice. And there are so many small things that I saw th...

This book was a lot of fun!It's basically, people just talking about their various jobs around the country. You get to read about everything from someone at Kinko's (yeah, this was written a while back) to a movie producer, to a doula. I got to learn about jobs I'd never thought about before, and a few, I may have paged through, as I'd worked that job or it wasn't as interesting as some of the other ones. Let me tell you, though, the job title didn't necessarily dictate which jobs were the most

Imagine that you're reading transcript after transcript from Ira Glass' This American Life. This will give you a little bit of an idea what's in store for you as you curl up with Gig.My sis gave me this book for Christmas, and it got me through some cold, dark, lonely winter days. These were my friends: the Wal-Mart Greeter, the Slaughterhouse HR Rep, the Hat-Store Owner, the Film Director. The most fascinating tales often came from the people with the most dull-sounding jobs, like the Universit...

This type of book should be printed every ten years or so. I originally picked this book up because of the title, "Gig." I assumed that Gig would mean it was printed recently, as in the gig economy. However, this book is from 1999 and already a lot of it is out of date. As a time piece, it is really interesting. Maybe not the best title, I can see the authors wanted to use a term that is a call back to Studs Terkel's Working but the term Gig alludes more to part time/contractor/not necessarily p...

This book was fascinating to me; it illustrated that the reasons why people choose the kind of work they do and how they feel towards it are as numerous and unique as the people themselves. The book covers the occupations you'd expect, but also sheds light on lesser-known occupations like moving huge pieces of art, or supervising workers at a chicken slaughtering facility, to give two examples. After I read this book, I felt I had learned more about the US's economy, demography, regional differe...

This book is a great escape. Hardly short of reading mini-documentaries on the lives of people you pass on the street. It truly defines the idea that everybody has a story. Embarrassingly enough, I think this book really brought to life the fact that someone has to clean up a crime scene. Why I had never thought of that before? I don't know! But it's a fantastic book--you'll find yourself anxious to read more and more.

After reading the Interview of the teacher I realized that this book did not accurately represent the typical experience of people in their jobs. I found some of the interviews ridiculous and appalling. I just couldn't get past some of it.

BOOK SCOUTSYou can't speed-read literature, but most of what I'm looking at is commercial fiction where you're basically reading for plot. It's not like the language is so intricateFortunately, scouts are salaried, so we don't have a pecuniary interest in any particular book. We're on retainer—we get a flat fee every month from our clients by contract and our income is steady. That means we just report on any book we think will be of interest to our clients. We learn their taste and they learn o...

This book follows a very simple formula. People across a wide variety of jobs were asked to talk about their work and the interviews are presented, with minimal editing. Thus, the structure mimics that of Studs Terkel's 1972 classic "Working" Although there are a couple of famous names (Jerry Bruckheimer, Heidi Klum), the great majority of the contributions are from 'ordinary people'. It’s remarkable how well things turned out. The book is wide-ranging, consistently interesting, fun to read, and...

A compilation of over 120 interviews with Americans talking about their jobs. These interviews, conducted by nearly 40 interviewers, are patterned after Stud Terkel’s book Working, written in 1972. Over 600 pages long, Gig has an incredibly diverse collection of frank, first-person discussions on a wide range of occupations, from Wal-Mart greeter and crime scene cleaner to a poultry factory worker and a member of Congress. As a result, the book provides an interesting way to get a sense of what

This book was really interesting and I'm glad that I randomly picked it up at Powell's. It is short, candid stories of people talking about what their jobs are all about. It covers ALL jobs, this thing is 700 pages long. But it's great, because it's all short, non sequitur stories so you can spread it out over a long period of time. Some of the stories are starting to become a little out of date. In one of them, the guy explains in great detail what this newfangled Powerpoint thing is that he us...

This book provides short essays, roughly 3-5 pages from various people across the country. Each of them writes about their jobs. Each essay is not only different in its author and their profession, but also in what they choose to write on. Some focus on what they do day to day while others focus on the strengths and weaknesses of their job, how they got there, etc.Some of the people hold positions of people that we have interacted with a lot in our lives but probably didn't stop to think about w...

This is a book of essays in which, as we learn from the title, Americans discuss their jobs. Examples of jobs and occupations talked about included pharmaceutical sales representative, Kinko's employee, psychic hotline operator, Navy sailor, male porn star, exotic dancer, funeral director, UPS or FedEx driver, prisoner, Hallmark employee, and Walmart greeter, among many others that I cannot remember at the moment. The book made for an interesting bathroom reader. In school, you hear about lawyer...

Large (near 700 pgs) book focusing on, well, Americans and their jobs, made up of a huge amount of various jobs (everything froom carnival workers to congressmen), most with section running about half a dozen or so pages. This is a blessing as someone of the folks here are pretty bland but it's easy to get through them due to length. But those are few and far between and most of the stuff is fairly interesting; occasionaly hilarious (the UPS worker who does everything BUT work and strangely enou...

Interesting snapshot into the lives of people doing a variety of jobs. I found it fascinating to hear the insider view of so many professions.However, I wish the interviewees were people that interested in doing their job long-term---so that you could get a feel for how it might be to do that job for a living. No such luck. Many of the interviewees complained about their job, and wanted to leave it as soon as possible. The interviewer could also have focused the interviews on the jobs more---man...

A series of short essays by Americans working in a number of different professions. This book has been interesting and informative, especially in reading about people with uncommon professions, such as strippers, UPS drivers, slaughterhouse human resources manager, etc.Having just finished the book, I think that overall it's ok. There are some really interesting essays on some professions that I wouldn't have necessarily thought to be interesting. But then there are also some essays that aren't

Excellent, well laid out and thought out, entertaining and thought-provoking. The jobs I enjoyed reading about most: Crime Scene Cleaner, Train Engineer, Florist, Food Stylist, Book Scout, Bookie (super interesting!), FBI Agent, Homicide Detective, U.S. Congressman (Barney Frank! his bit is one of the best parts of the book). I guess Accountant and Librarian are 2 jobs that were not deemed interesting enough to make the cut ;) but this was a fascinating book overall and well worth reading. You'd...

Another book that reads like an expanded version of HONY. I found it hard to put down--fascinating not just for the details of what other people's jobs are like, but for the interplay between their thoughts, emotions, dreams, and work. Gig would make interesting recommended reading for every high school or college student, to expand their idea of the range of employment waiting for them out there--it's not just doctor, lawyer, teacher, nurse. It's the UPS guy and a Hollywood producer's assistant...

***1/2I first heard of this book on This American Life. It reads like a podcast in that it is based on interviews. It's also on the long side (I'm not sure how long, since I read it on my Kindle). It's one of those books you can pick up and put down, and much of it I would read if I couldn't sleep. Some of the stories are more interesting than others, and it's a bit dated (based on various references in the book, I would say most of the interviews took place in the late 90s/ early 2000s). I reco...

Quite possibly the most fascinating series of accounts I have ever read concerning hardship, employment and everyday life in this undercultured and overworked country I reside in.The most interesting is undoubtedly the "crime scene cleanup" guy. Most interesting is the candid nature of the discussions that results in admiration, disdain and every emotion sandwiched in-between; all brought to the surface chapter after chapter. My most loaned-out book to date. Someone actually has it right now.

I guess it isn't fair to ask anybody to be as good as Studs Terkel was at coaxing out the important matters when interviewing people, but I was disappointed in this collection.First, it is ten years old, so the interviews took place in the go-go nineties--outdated.Second, the interviewers just let the people ramble on about their jobs (this is lack of editing) and rarely does an important point get made (this is lack of good interview skills, or maybe people aren't as introspective and wise as t...