American Grunt

By Kevin Cramer,

Book cover of American Grunt: Ridiculous Stories of a Life Lived at $8.00 an Hour

Book description

Working dead-end blue-collar jobs your whole life can take a dramatic physical and emotional toll-unless you learn to embrace the absurdity.

Kevin Cramer has almost died at work three separate times, surviving each incident only through a minor miracle. It got him asking the question-why? Why do so many of…

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Why read it?

1 author picked American Grunt as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

American Grunt is for anyone who’s ever worked a shitty manual labor job for minimum wage (i.e., most of America).

As a kind of literary outsider, Cramer – who narrates with a forceful, friendly humor, as if he’s got his arm around the reader’s shoulder – writes compellingly about his decades on construction sites and in warehouses and behind the wheels of delivery trucks. Life, that is, as a grunt.

There aren’t many writers out there who can articulate the absurdity of such a life… a life at the intersections of poverty, danger, apathy, and frustration. Cramer’s one of them.…

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Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route up…

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