A Living
Working-Class Americans Talk to Their Doctor
by Michael D. Stein
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Pub Date 29 Apr 2025 | Archive Date 21 Apr 2025
Melville House Publishing | Melville House
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Description
A Living is a vivid portrait of the working lives of the patients who visit Dr. Michael Stein, a primary care doctor in urban America. What makes his patients unique is that they, by and large, do demanding manual labor. Very few have the luxury of working remotely, or seated.
Inspired by Studs Terkel’s classic Working, Stein produces an eye-opening look at what it’s like to have to work long hours at physical jobs for a paycheck in America. A Living is composed of vignettes, snap shots of people’s working lives, the dramas, disappointments and frustrations workers have with their colleagues, family co-workers, and supervisors.
And yet it also captures the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, the opportunities for initiative and self-expression that come from doing intricate work with one’s hands. Work gives Stein’s patients a sense of identity and a social environment to thrive in.
Ultimately, A Living is an extraordinarily powerful and poetic tableaux of working-class America at this moment when manual labor may be the final refuge in the new era of AI.
Available Editions
EDITION | Other Format |
ISBN | 9781685891909 |
PRICE | US$26.99 (USD) |
PAGES | 224 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews

A physician reflects on his patients with working class jobs and the interconnectedness between our health and our jobs. He is self-aware enough to recognize the skill, grit and resilience needed for some of the jobs that pay the least. Jobs that require workers to use their hands or physical labor are cut from a different cloth than jobs that can be performed at a computer.
During the pandemic many of these blue-collar workers were hailed as essential workers, but they were put in harm's way and were not able to work from home. My husband was considered an essential worker and had to change clothes and shower before hugging our children when he came home from work during the early days of COVID. It was scary, and difficult to communicate to our toddlers about why Daddy couldn't hold them right away.
The need for skills-based jobs and trade schools is growing in awareness, and I hope the stigma of blue collar jobs changes as people learn how vital tradespeople are to our society.
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