Why am I passionate about this?

The blue-collar everyman lives on the periphery, coming and going with little fanfare. But what does he think and feel? How does he view the world? I became interested in these questions while working for my father’s rug business. I started as a part-timer in the early 90s, straddling the line between academe and the homes of the rich. He employed me for the next twenty years, supplementing my income as I found my way as a university professor. The books listed led me to a deeper appreciation of my father’s vocation, but only in writing Rug Man did I come to understand the true meaning of work. 


I wrote

Rug Man

By David Amadio,

Book cover of Rug Man

What is my book about?

Rug Man tells the story of Frank “Ace” Renzetti, an aging carpet installer who works the posh neighborhoods of Philly’s…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Jungle

David Amadio Why did I love this book?

Jurgis Rudkus, the protagonist of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle, is a Lithuanian immigrant who comes to Chicago at the turn of the 20th century to work in the city’s notorious meat-packing industry.

Described as a “very steady man” who “does not easily lose his temper,” Jurgis reminds me of my father, Jerry. Like Jurgis, my father’s solution to most of life’s problems is to just work harder, regardless of the personal consequences.

In the novel, Jurgis injures himself on the job and Sinclair captures not only his physical agony but the more formidable dread of not being able to provide for his family, the working-man’s greatest fear.

Often panned for over-politicizing Jurgis’s plight, The Jungle elevates an anonymous member of the laboring class and presents him as a symbol of virtue, valor, and hope.

By Upton Sinclair,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked The Jungle as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

First serialized in a newspaper in 1905, The Jungle is a classic of American literature that led to the creation of food-safety standards.

While investigating the meatpacking industry in Chicago, author and novelist Upton Sinclair discovered the brutal conditions that immigrant families faced. While his original intention was to bring this to the attention of the American public, his book was instead hailed for bringing food safety to the forefront of people's consciousness.

With its inspired plot and vivid descriptions, Upton Sinclair's classic tale of immigrant woe is now available as an elegantly designed clothbound edition with an elastic closure…


Book cover of Christ In Concrete

David Amadio Why did I love this book?

Published the same year as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, di Donato’s Christ in Concrete is another closely drawn portrait of working-class immigrants, this time the Italian-American bricklayers of New York City’s Lower East Side.

On top of its lyricism and spirited narrative pace, what I find most refreshing about di Donato’s tale is its choice of subject matter. So much of what we read and hear about the Italian-American experience tends to focus on the Mafia, perpetuating negative stereotypes that have dogged paisans since the late 19th century.

While I’ll never be the one to turn off Goodfellas, I long for more stories like that of Geremio and his irrepressible son, Paul, “born artists of brick and mortar.”

By Pietro di Donato,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Christ In Concrete as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Giving voice to the hardworking Italian immigrants who worked, lived, and died in New York City shortly before the Great Depression, this American classic ranks with Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as one of the 20th century’s great works of social protest.
 
Largely autobiographical, Christ in Concrete opens with the dramatic Good Friday collapse of a building under construction, crucifying in concrete an Italian construction worker, whose death leaves his pregnant wife and eight children impoverished. His oldest son, Paul, at just twelve years old, must take over his father’s role—and his job.
 
Paul’s odyssey into manhood begins on the…


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Book cover of Crossing: A Chinese Family Railroad Novel

Crossing By Lisa Redfern,

Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad. 

Book cover of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

David Amadio Why did I love this book?

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, published in 1941 to great critical acclaim, centers on three tenant families living in Alabama’s Cotton Belt during the Great Depression.

Through Agee’s Elizabethan, “night-permeated” prose and Evans’s unflinching B & W photographs, the reader experiences every aspect of these sharecroppers’ lives—their shelter, their customs, and, most pointedly, their work.

The university where I teach sits across the road from an Amish farm, and I often wonder how these good people carry on. They possess a dignity and a grace, but, like Agee’s subjects, they perform “simple and terrible work,” so routine and so repetitive that it becomes “the very essence of their lives.”

And yet, miraculously, it does not break them; they persist, and this book, in an indirect and unexpected way, has illuminated that persistence for me. 

By James Agee, Walker Evans,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In the summer of 1936, Agee and Evans set out on assignement for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the South. Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration and a watershed literary event when in 1941 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was first published to enourmous critical acclaim. This unspairing record of place, of the people who shaped the land, and of the rhythm of their lives today stands as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century.


Book cover of Revolutionary Road

David Amadio Why did I love this book?

I came to Richard Yates through his short stories, but it is his 1961 novel, Revolutionary Road, that endeared me to him for all time.

Frank Wheeler, Yates’s protagonist, works in the Sales Promotion department at a company called Knox, commuting each day from his home in the suburbs to an office building in New York City. Knox is a world of folders and tabulators and typewriters and code numbers, Wheeler’s “bright, dry, daily ordeal, his personal measure of tedium.”

But despite being a site of spiritual murder, Knox affords Wheeler a degree of solace, as he takes “dim pleasure in the very discomfort of the office.” I’m not above saying that I, too, derive a strange satisfaction from the numbness and predictability of my own place of work.

Sometimes, what kills us is what gets us by. 

By Richard Yates,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked Revolutionary Road as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Hailed as a masterpiece from its first publication, Revolutionary Road is the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright young couple who are bored by the banalities of suburban life and long to be extraordinary. With heartbreaking compassion and clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April's decision to change their lives for the better leads to betrayal and tragedy.


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Book cover of Feral Maril & Her Little Brother Carol

Feral Maril & Her Little Brother Carol By Leslie Tall Manning,

Winner of the Literary Titan Book Award

Bright but unassuming Marilyn Jones has some grown-up decisions to make, especially after Mama goes to prison for drugs and larceny. With no one to take care of them, Marilyn and her younger, mentally challenged brother, Carol, get tossed into the foster care…

Book cover of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

David Amadio Why did I love this book?

In this profound yet highly readable book, the contemporary French philosopher Alain de Botton profiles a number of career professionals, among them an accountant, a painter, a transmission engineer, and yes, a rocket scientist.

At the heart of de Botton’s enquiry is a rather simple question: Is work more than just making money? I believe that it is, and the philosopher’s conclusions say as much.

He urges workers of all stripes to “make an imaginative connection between what they have done with their working days and their impact upon others.” Writing these recommendations has been a kind of work, and it’s not hard for me to imagine that my words have had some impact upon you, my reader, an influence, hopefully, beyond the decision to purchase my book

By Alain de Botton,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From one of our greatest voices in modern philosophy, author of The Course of Love, The Consolations of Philosophy, Religion for Atheists and The School of Life - a lucid exploration of the state in which most of us spend most of our lives

'De Botton's wit and powers of ironic observation are on display throughout what is a stylish and original book. The workplace brings out the best in his writing' Sunday Times

'Timely, wonderfully readable. De Botton has pretty much got to the bottom of the subject' Spectator

'Terribly funny, touches us all' Daily Mail

'Brilliant, enormously engaging'…


Explore my book 😀

Rug Man

By David Amadio,

Book cover of Rug Man

What is my book about?

Rug Man tells the story of Frank “Ace” Renzetti, an aging carpet installer who works the posh neighborhoods of Philly’s Main Line. At a time when he should be considering retirement, Frank takes on a monster job that pushes him to the brink. The house is owned by an eccentric divorcee, a pampered dog sabotages everyone’s work, and the general contractor patrols the site as if it’s the border. As the job’s challenges mount, the fate of Frank’s business, and, with that, the fate of his blue-collar genius, become increasingly uncertain.

Wry and insightful, Rug Man is a tribute to a bygone era of craftsmen whose work was the source of their greatest suffering but also their greatest pride.

Book cover of The Jungle
Book cover of Christ In Concrete
Book cover of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

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