BARBARA GARSON is an award-winning playwright, journalist, and the author of three books, All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work, The Electronic Sweatshop, and most recently Money Makes the World Go Around: One Investor Tracks Her Cash Through the Global Economy. Her play MacBird was the literary opening shot of the sixties, and The Dinosaur Door won an Obie. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times, Newsweek, and the Nation.
Praise for Down the Up Escalator:
“In the official estimation of government economists, the Great
Recession ended in 2009. But in Barbara Garson’s new book, it lives
on. And for the people whose stories she tells, the Great Recession
may never die. . . . Down the Up Escalator is best read as a
kind of travelogue through a beaten-down but-not-broken United
States. . . . [It is] an engaging, insightful account of the
changes that have swept through an America where good, hard-working
people are learning to make do with less money, less opportunity
and less free time. . . . A willingness to portray the
complexity of Americans’ personal responses to macroeconomic
disaster helps make Garson’s book a lively read, despite its grim
subject matter. So many books that treat the subject of economic
restructuring portray working Americans as hapless victims. Garson
is too sharp an observer, and too honest a writer, to do that . . .
her lucid book makes it clear that with each new crisis the
American people will survive by digging deeper into their supplies
of creativity, courage and humor.” —Hector Tobar, Los Angeles
Times
“Barbara Garson has written a small masterpiece of wise and
alarming reportage about how ordinary Americans are surviving
during extraordinarily rotten times. Down the Up Escalator is a
necessary antidote to all the blather about ‘freeing’ banks and
investment houses from ‘crippling regulations.’” —Michael Kazin,
author of American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation
“Do you want to know both how and why we got into the economic mess
we are in—and what it really means in the everyday life of real
people? What is driving the pain deep in the bowels of the
system—and how people are trying to counter it in the real world?
Read this book; no one does it better and makes it readable and
human to boot, than Barbara Garson.” —Gar Alperovitz, author of
America Beyond Capitalism
“Most recessions come and go and leave little in their wake. People
return to jobs, banks resume lending. But the Great Recession
struck directly at the American dream of long-term employment and
home ownership. Barbara Garson’s book is not about the collapse of
firms that bet on complex derivatives, but about the human costs of
the Great Recession. She recounts eloquently the bad dream from
which we have still not awakened. Years from now, when historians
want to know what it was really like to live during this recession,
they'll find no better place to look than Garson’s book.” —John B.
Judis, Senior Editor, The New Republic and Visiting Scholar, The
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
“Barbara Garson knows that the hard times so many people are living
through are not just composed of headlines about corporate profits,
unemployment rates and foreclosures; they are composed of human
beings. This book is a compassionate, probing, pointillist
mural of the Great Recession and of the decades-long erosion of the
average American’s economic position that preceded it, all told
through the experiences of individual men and women. She has
followed some over time, has sought out others whose lives
illuminate larger injustices, and has found people whose stories
will stick with you.” —Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s
Ghost
“Barbara Garson writes an honest and moving dispatch from the front
lines of America’s new class war. These are the mounting
casualties, betrayed by the American Dream and now
struggling—largely alone—for survival and simple human dignity.
Garson’s real-life stories give clues as to why the battered middle
class has not yet erupted politically—and why it still might.” Jeff
Faux, author of The Servant Economy and Distinguished Fellow,
Economic Policy Institute
“In this evocative book, Barbara Garson hears out a host of
victims, gamblers, and scramblers ensnared in the network of
rackets that drives the American economy, and shows how high-level
policies produce collateral damage and blast dreams. This is
reporting for hearts and minds alike.” —Todd Gitlin, author of
Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of
Occupy Wall Street
“Americans cope with the fallout from 40 years of dwindling
prospects in this quietly harrowing mosaic of economic decline.
Journalist Garson (All the Livelong Day) focuses on the
basics—jobs, homes, money—and the people who have lost them since
the 2008 financial crisis: a group of middle-aged New Yorkers who
comfort each other as their layoffs turn into long-term
unemployment; California homeowners, some facing immediate
eviction, while others cynically game the foreclosure system;
elderly pensioners who suddenly find their nest eggs crushed.
Through their stories, she weaves lucid explanations of the
mortgage bubble and financial speculations that wrecked the system,
situating them within a larger analysis of the generations-long
post-Vietnam economic transformation that replaced middle-class
jobs with low-paid contingent labor, widened the gulf between the
rich and the rest, and forced workers to take on ever more debt to
keep their heads above water. Garson’s vivid, shrewd, warmly
sympathetic profiles show the resilience with which ordinary
Americans respond to misfortune, but also the enduring costs as
they abandon hopes for a fulfilling career, an extra child, or a
secure retirement. The result is a compelling portrait of an
economy that has turned against the people.” —Publishers Weekly
(starred)
“Garson . . . combines her skills as a dramatist with her
activist's conscience in this study of the economic issues
confronting individuals and families in different parts of the
country. . . . A skillful presentation that lifts the veil too
often hiding areas that should be brought to light.” —Kirkus
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