Dave Eggers has taken upon himself the task of chronicling the changing landscape of an emergent America in the global economy. In A Hologram for the King, we read about the erosion of the culture of manufacturing in this nation; a particular victim is Alan Clay, who has been edged out of the manufacturing competition and cornered into the slot, Eggers disdainfully refers to as "consulting". Consulting, in the eyes of Clay's father, a retired worker for a national railroad company, is a pansy occupation which has emasculated the American labor ethos.
Eggers pitches Clay as a representative American worker, shaped by traditional American middle-class ethos. However, he is still a fictionalized version of the American middle-class man whose entire way of life has been affected by economic globalization.
In Factory Man, veteran journalist Beth Macy, gets the saga of the aforementioned demographic straight from the horse's mouth. The book is a work of non-fiction with the same kind of sublimity achieved by the best works of fiction as Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Aman Sethi's A Free Man, among others.
For me, it's a must read, as I take a keen interest in work that records the histories of the lives of ordinary, sometimes poor, citizens of the globe who contribute toward the globe's changes yet remain invisible and unacknowledged.
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