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by: Ben Hamper Dewey Decimal Number: 331.76292092 EAN: 9780446515016 ISBN: 0446515019 Label: Little, Brown & Company Manufacturer: Little, Brown & Company Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 234 Publication Date: 1991-08 Publisher: Little, Brown & Company Sales Rank: 692021 Studio: Little, Brown & Company Related Items:
Editorial Review: Product Description: A former 'shoprat' in a Michigan auto plant offers a gritty account of life in the world of manufacturing, on and off the assembly line. Reprint. NYT. PW. Average Rating:
 Rating:  - A good-natured blue collar Hunter ThompsonRight from the gitgo Ben Hamper's Rivethead grabs you with gritty gusto of passages such as the above; Hamper is an extraordinary writer about life for the ordinary guy... at least the ordinary guy who winds up as an automotive assembly-line worker for General Motors in Flint, Michigan--once considered the Automobile Capital of the World. The author is a natural shop rat, growing up in Flint, with an alcoholic mostly absentee father and a long-suffering, working-three-jobs mother trying to raise ... Read More Rating: - If you ever wondered why factory workers drink, read this....The endless monotony and idiot bosses drive anybody with an IQ above their shoe size to do something to kill the thought that, if they're lucky, they only have 30 more years of mind numbing drudgery to go before they can retire. I'm not saying alcohol abuse is the proper outlet, but it does seem to be the most common and most convenient. Good book, excellent portrayal of what exactly "blue collar America" does for a living. Rating: - riveting tale from the assembly line..Ben Hamper shares his life as a worker on the GM assembly line in Flint, MI. Bold, frank, honest and often hilarious. This book was recommended to me years ago and for some reason I never read it until now. Hamper chronicles a part of American history (manufacturing jobs) that seem to be going stateside or as Ross Perot once described in a quip about NAFTA, what's that whoosing noise? manufacturing jobs headed to Mexico. This is prose for the ages. Loved the book. Rating: - Hilarious story of a dying breedI grew up with people like Ben Hamper in a place which was much like Flint. For the first couple years of my adult life, I did the kind of work he did. What he describes is the tail end of a lifestyle; the lifestyle of the shop rat. It's dirty, monotonous and smelly. Many of the people you work with are either below average in intelligence or in sanity. Drugs, booze and having no concept of "forethought" are fundamental parts of the culture. It's nihilism with a rivet gun. If you come from a place ... Read More Rating:  - I have my own tales from an Assembly LineI didn't really like reading this book because I too work in a (once) major three Auto plant. I didn't feel that it properly portrayed some of the workers. It made it sound like all workers are like the author where they just really don't give a damn about anything except having a joking time on the job. It also made the workers sound like they were underachieving, undereducated, bottom of the barrel workers and I didn't care to have that stigma for all of us. I hold two bachelor degrees, like my ... Read More |
