Great Books: Words to Live By (cont.)

More titles to get you started, and address
the many questions that begin with "Why?"



Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power
, C. Fred Alford, Cornell University Press, 2001. A detailed and scholarly study of people who have made the choice to protest and challenge unethical business practices at work. Although not everybody will agree with everything Alford says about whistleblowers and their motives, the book nevertheless presents a dark and powerful look at modern government and organizational structures.

Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do , Studs Terkel, Pantheon Books/Random House, 1972-1974. This groundbreaking book, by one of the 20th Century's most respected interviewers, profiles dozens of people from different ethnic backgrounds, economic levels and careers. Although the book is not about bullies or workplace abuse, the stories capture the workplace, its blessings and its curses on many levels. It was so timely that several of the stories were selected and transformed into a hit Broadway musical. Thrity years later, many truths of these personal accounts ring true today.

Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich, Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt and Company), 2001. At the dawn of the current recession, this book received much-deserved buzz. Ehrenreich, literally, gets down and dirty by altering her college-educated identity and accepting some of our economy's most thankless, underpaid positions. Her keen, discriptive storytelling takes you into the squalor of serving, scrubbing, selling and surviving in three distinctly different regions of the U.S. What remains a constant, however, is the repression, abuse, subordination and desperation that befalls employees. Now an acclaimed play off-Broadway (2002)

Downsize This!, by Michael Moore, Crown Publishers, 1996. The affable working class guy who brought us the wickedly brilliant "Roger & Me," "T.V. Nation" and "The Awful Truth" proved he could also pack a punch on paper with this book. These hiliarious, searing essays, in part, touch on the ways corporate culture and politics squelch individual American workers and families on a large scale. Topics such as ethics, morals and tolerance also get quite a workout, too.

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