Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams Paperback - 2005 - 1st Edition

First line

I now live a middle-class life, working at a white-collar newspaper-man's job, but I was born blue collar.

From the rear cover

A groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction

This powerful book uncovers a cultural phenomenon--the limbo existence of people raised in blue-collar families, living white-collar lives. Limbo presents a thoughtful look at this phenomenon through the author's personal story, and those of 100 interviewees, all struggling with the duality that exists in their workplaces, their hearts, and their minds.

"In Limbo, people straddle two social zones ... The future is never assured when you come from a house of rough hands. There are many profound opinions in this major newspaperman's reporting."
--JIMMY BRESLIN Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez

"If you have any bloodlines at all to the working class, you will recognize--and newly discover-- yourself in Alfred Lubrano's inspired book. Limbo brings to life the minefield crossover from the blue-collar world to the white-collar one in prose that is at once trout-stream clear and luminous. It's the very American, real-as-a-streetfight story of a bricklayer's son's own uneasy journey out of Bensonhurst woven movingly with the journeys of a legion of other 'Straddlers.' Don't pass this gem by."
--SYDNEY SCHANBERG Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of The Death and Life of Dith Pran

"Al Lubrano is a great reporter and the kind of writer whose work is infused with both thought and feeling. He has chosen here a great and often overlooked subject, the role of class in modern American society, and has produced a book rich with insight into both his own life and all our lives. If you are like me, you will nod your head with recognition throughout."
--MARK BOWDEN author of Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo