Working the Aisles: A Life in Consumption by Robert Appelbaum


Working the Aisles: A Life in Consumption
Title : Working the Aisles: A Life in Consumption
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 1782793577
ISBN-10 : 9781782793571
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 244
Publication : First published May 30, 2014

Working the Aisles takes the reader on tumultuous driving trips across the United States and France, on phone sex escapades in San Francisco, on banking battles in Sweden, and many other adventures - including, of course, on trips to supermarkets, where the author has had to 'work the aisles'. Moving back and forth through time, like a novelist, indeed in something of a memoirist tour de force, the book develops the story of struggle, of poverty and depression, but also of gaiety and desire, of a will to live in spite of it all, and to keep working the aisles. It moves the reader through highs and lows, through episodes of ecstasy and thoughts about suicide, and tells how this particular Everyman ended up sane but sorry.

Working the Aisles: A Life in Consumption Reviews

  • Jill Blevins

    This book . . . I read it once and then turned around and read it again immediately after. Every chapter is like an anthropological study, and not about some faraway culture but about this pretty normal man. There's so much here - growing up in Ohio/Chicago suburbs, blended families, cultural shifts in the 1970's, suicidal thoughts, San Francisco and Oakland (and my neighborhood!), limo driving/accompanying rich old ladies to Original Joe's at Westlake, weird people, more weird people, even more weird people, jail in Nebraska, camping in rural France, shopping in England, professor life, and consumerism. And a whole lot more.

    The best part for me is that the author ends up in freaking Uppsala Sweden. If there is justice in the world for all the crazy our family and employers and big food does to us, there it is.

  • Marvin

    Ce livre n'est pas tant un essai critique sur la société de consommation, comme je m'y attendais, mais une autobiographie. Le moins que l'on puisse dire, c'est que Robert Appelbaum n'a pas toujours eu une vie facile: précarité, alcoolisme, relations instables, solitude. Finalement, c'est la vie d'un homme qui n'est pas né avec "une cuiller d'argent dans la bouche", qui a parfois pris de mauvaises décisions mais qui a réussi à trouver sa place dans le monde, au bout du compte.