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99 Jobs: Blood, Sweat, and Houses
Joe repairs homes. With each job,he enters somebody’s private world. Revealing a life. Or changing it. Here’s blue collar writing, finely crafted, about good hard work — and some bad work, too. Meet proud carpenters and working-class hippies. Meet clients who flirt, cheat, seduce, fight — and clients who will warm your heart. Learn the taste of sewage, the jolt of a live wire. Drive to the emergency clinic with a wooden stake through your hand. Feel the satisfaction of work that is honest, simple, strong — sometimes perfect. Ninety-nine stories that are gritty, funny, wise. And always deeply humane.
- GenresNonfiction
294 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2013
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433 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
February 4, 2014
99 Jobs deserves a wide readership. Joe Cottonwood is a contractor and jack-of-all-trades: carpenter, plumber, electrician, roofer, you name it. He’s someone who gets things done. 99 Jobs is a series of vignettes about, as Cottonwood puts it, the “joy in the work of the body”—about the rewards, and headaches, of making things, and the pleasures, and headaches, of dealing with the people you’re making them for.
Cottonwood is a craftsman and writes like one—without ostentation, but with care and precision. He’s observant about both the people he works for and the projects they ask him to do. He’s frank in appraising the limits and vanities of the people he meets on the job, but also appreciative of their moments of generosity and trust and wit. Cottonwood draws a remarkable series of portraits—of ex-vets, working-class hippies, imperious architects, a troubled brother, a family that’s worth all this work (and helps out with much of it), and some truly oddball clients. The story that perhaps stands out most for me is “The Rookie,” which describes an education in labor and life all at once. A well-written book about, I suspect, a life well-lived.
Cottonwood is a craftsman and writes like one—without ostentation, but with care and precision. He’s observant about both the people he works for and the projects they ask him to do. He’s frank in appraising the limits and vanities of the people he meets on the job, but also appreciative of their moments of generosity and trust and wit. Cottonwood draws a remarkable series of portraits—of ex-vets, working-class hippies, imperious architects, a troubled brother, a family that’s worth all this work (and helps out with much of it), and some truly oddball clients. The story that perhaps stands out most for me is “The Rookie,” which describes an education in labor and life all at once. A well-written book about, I suspect, a life well-lived.
January 20, 2014
Tackled a house project? Owned by a house? Thinking of buying a house? You'll enjoy "99 Jobs: Blood, Sweat, and Houses" by Joe Cottonwood.
A collection of encounters and challenges in the life of a handyman, the titular 99 vignettes are insightful and funny, a increasingly rare combination these days.
Told in a narrative style too sparse to be called chatty, but definitely friendly, reading "99 Jobs" is sort of like kicking back with a buddy at your local and asking, "So? How was your day?" If that sounds like a "guy book," it isn't. The situations are universal, the specifics unimportant. The clients and contractors are interesting for their humanity, not the diameter of their pipes - you'll recognize the types whether you've encountered them in the salon or the barber shop.
The downfall of most collections is an uneven level of quality. The tendency is to start strong with some stellar insights and belly laughs, then lay the book aside as the writer gets past the anecdotes that suggested "Hey! This could be a book!" and begins to struggle to fill the pages. Cottonwood's many years in the field clearly provided lots of experience on which to draw, resulting in a compilation that entertains from beginning to end.
My pre-Twitter father would have called this one a "bathroom book." Not a judgement on either its content or its potential as bathroom tissue, but on the length of its individual anecdotes. Averaging a page or so, the entries are perfect for those instances when even a short story is too long. Think of all the places where you wait, whether in your car or shuffling in a line, and you'll appreciate having "99 Jobs" handy.
The only hiccup in this collection is the precipitous start. Without an introduction of any sort, and chapter headings amorphous enough for a literary novel, the reader is just dumped directly into the first vignette. If feels a bit willy-nilly on page one, but, fortunately, the first entries are engaging and you just sort of stop noticing the headers any way.
Listening to anyone talk about the thing they're passionate about, the thing that gets their hands sketching in midair, gets them leaning forward in their chair, sees them laughing and engaged is always a treat. You can't see Cottonwood, but, his passion for his subject rises off every page. You don't need to know your way around an electrical panel to enjoy this one - and you will enjoy it!
This review based on a promotional copy provided at no charge through the Goodreads' First Reads Program.
A collection of encounters and challenges in the life of a handyman, the titular 99 vignettes are insightful and funny, a increasingly rare combination these days.
Told in a narrative style too sparse to be called chatty, but definitely friendly, reading "99 Jobs" is sort of like kicking back with a buddy at your local and asking, "So? How was your day?" If that sounds like a "guy book," it isn't. The situations are universal, the specifics unimportant. The clients and contractors are interesting for their humanity, not the diameter of their pipes - you'll recognize the types whether you've encountered them in the salon or the barber shop.
The downfall of most collections is an uneven level of quality. The tendency is to start strong with some stellar insights and belly laughs, then lay the book aside as the writer gets past the anecdotes that suggested "Hey! This could be a book!" and begins to struggle to fill the pages. Cottonwood's many years in the field clearly provided lots of experience on which to draw, resulting in a compilation that entertains from beginning to end.
My pre-Twitter father would have called this one a "bathroom book." Not a judgement on either its content or its potential as bathroom tissue, but on the length of its individual anecdotes. Averaging a page or so, the entries are perfect for those instances when even a short story is too long. Think of all the places where you wait, whether in your car or shuffling in a line, and you'll appreciate having "99 Jobs" handy.
The only hiccup in this collection is the precipitous start. Without an introduction of any sort, and chapter headings amorphous enough for a literary novel, the reader is just dumped directly into the first vignette. If feels a bit willy-nilly on page one, but, fortunately, the first entries are engaging and you just sort of stop noticing the headers any way.
Listening to anyone talk about the thing they're passionate about, the thing that gets their hands sketching in midair, gets them leaning forward in their chair, sees them laughing and engaged is always a treat. You can't see Cottonwood, but, his passion for his subject rises off every page. You don't need to know your way around an electrical panel to enjoy this one - and you will enjoy it!
This review based on a promotional copy provided at no charge through the Goodreads' First Reads Program.
August 29, 2017
Great
Very nice book. It accurately describes life as a family man and carpenter. We should all be so lucky!
A life well lived
Very nice book. It accurately describes life as a family man and carpenter. We should all be so lucky!
A life well lived
March 11, 2014
Joe Cottonwood’s writing is like the contracting jobs he describes: all of it is solid and necessary and useful, which is a kind of beauty in itself, and much of it also shimmers with something more.
And he’s funny, the humor catching me by surprise every time as it flashed out from his understated prose. At the doctor after a work accident, he writes, “I suppose it looks like somebody attacked me with a wooden stake. Like I was fighting a vampire.” I loved his wry commentaries on the absurdities of everyday life, “I seal the escutcheons with Macklanburg-Duncan caulk that sates on the tube: ‘Guaranteed for 50 years!’ Total bullshit. The stuff was only invented a few years ago. Who knows how long it will last? And what if it fails after, say, forty-seven years? Can I tell, by looking at a forty-seven-year-old bead of caulk, what company manufactured it? Do I bring in the original tube and cash register receipt, which of course I’ve been saving for forty-seven years? Will Macklanburg-Duncan still exist? Will mankind? If I’m still alive, I’ll be eighty-six years old.”
He never sentimentalizes the physical labor he does -- he’s clear and honest about how often he’s hot and sweaty and covered with dust in a hot attic, or damp and cold in a spidery crawl space. And yet he’s also clear and honest about its pleasures, “I loved threading pipe. There’s joy in the work of the body.”
His imagery is so grounded in the specifics of his work -- caulk and paint, digging holes, screwing in new boards, that the broader human connections he makes seem solid and real, never trite or sentimental. In “Gunther’s vents,” he writes of a plumbing repair. “Vents are not a glamour item, but you need them . . . . I stay for dinner. My job, after all, is home repair . . . Nothing glamorous, but something he needs. Conversation. Venting. Equalizing the pressure.”
I found myself turning down the corners of many pages in order to remember a particularly vivid phrase or sentence: “One thing about me: pain makes me stupid.” Snippets of poetry, haiku-like, punctuate some of the later essays, but others not in poetic form are nonetheless gems, “Building shelter, making children, we construct our cluttered lives.” Or this, which I don’t need a turned-down page to remember, from the end of “Everybody Lives Somewhere,” an essay about a near miss accident and a late attempt at another child, “Almost eighteen years have passed. I miss that boy who never was.”
Cottonwood has a finely honed sense of class, social structures, race, and gender relations, but he never uses those abstract terms to convey the pain and paradox of how they play out. “Jim the Plumber” narrates a humane encounter between Joe (who describes himself as a hippie) and a Vietnam vet. Or this, from “Plenty,” “When I meet the ‘nice young doctor,’ he introduces himself as Doctor Strimwick and calls me by my first name. Strike one.” Or “Plattsburgh Hillbillies,” in which Cottonwood tells of the white ex-con who uses the n-word but then takes up with an African-American woman. When the neighbors say they wouldn’t know what to say to “somebody like that,” Cottonwood replies, “‘I just talk’ . . . I couldn’t imagine cutting myself off from that much of the world.”
I loved the honesty of “The Road Not Taken,” in which he tells of his yearning -- just for a moment -- to leave his family and flee to the ease of pipeline work in Alaska without family responsibilities, but then -- as we knew he would -- buys the yogurt and laundry soap his wife has asked him to pick up. And I love his honesty about himself -- for example, in “Brotherhood of the Sidewalk,” when his brother backs him against neighbors complaining about a truck parked in their way. Afterwards his brother says, “You shouldn’t have blocked the sidewalk” and Joe replies, “I know.” In “The Bill,” he shows the ways in which we can all become someone we don’t recognize, “There is no redeeming way to end this story. Physical work isn’t just physical. There are personalities involved. Personal chemistry. The wrong mix can explode.”
He captures the preciousness of daily moments: daughter throwing up first thing in the morning, a cut finger and a tarantula bite in the afternoon, returning home to a furnace on fire, yet “we still have a house. We still have our lives. It will be a day of cleanup, hot chocolate, warm jackets; but the sunshine feels cheerful, and, really, you never know what will happen next, do you?”
Toward the end of the book, Cottonwood reflects on his own life and writing, how he would rather have been a full-time writer if only it had paid all the bills. I wish, for his sake and as a pleased reader, that he’d had more time to write, too. But I can’t bring myself to wish he hadn’t done construction work at all, because then we wouldn’t have had these stories.
** Full disclosure: The author provided me a review copy after seeing my Review of Mike Rose's _The Mind at Work_ on Goodreads.**
And he’s funny, the humor catching me by surprise every time as it flashed out from his understated prose. At the doctor after a work accident, he writes, “I suppose it looks like somebody attacked me with a wooden stake. Like I was fighting a vampire.” I loved his wry commentaries on the absurdities of everyday life, “I seal the escutcheons with Macklanburg-Duncan caulk that sates on the tube: ‘Guaranteed for 50 years!’ Total bullshit. The stuff was only invented a few years ago. Who knows how long it will last? And what if it fails after, say, forty-seven years? Can I tell, by looking at a forty-seven-year-old bead of caulk, what company manufactured it? Do I bring in the original tube and cash register receipt, which of course I’ve been saving for forty-seven years? Will Macklanburg-Duncan still exist? Will mankind? If I’m still alive, I’ll be eighty-six years old.”
He never sentimentalizes the physical labor he does -- he’s clear and honest about how often he’s hot and sweaty and covered with dust in a hot attic, or damp and cold in a spidery crawl space. And yet he’s also clear and honest about its pleasures, “I loved threading pipe. There’s joy in the work of the body.”
His imagery is so grounded in the specifics of his work -- caulk and paint, digging holes, screwing in new boards, that the broader human connections he makes seem solid and real, never trite or sentimental. In “Gunther’s vents,” he writes of a plumbing repair. “Vents are not a glamour item, but you need them . . . . I stay for dinner. My job, after all, is home repair . . . Nothing glamorous, but something he needs. Conversation. Venting. Equalizing the pressure.”
I found myself turning down the corners of many pages in order to remember a particularly vivid phrase or sentence: “One thing about me: pain makes me stupid.” Snippets of poetry, haiku-like, punctuate some of the later essays, but others not in poetic form are nonetheless gems, “Building shelter, making children, we construct our cluttered lives.” Or this, which I don’t need a turned-down page to remember, from the end of “Everybody Lives Somewhere,” an essay about a near miss accident and a late attempt at another child, “Almost eighteen years have passed. I miss that boy who never was.”
Cottonwood has a finely honed sense of class, social structures, race, and gender relations, but he never uses those abstract terms to convey the pain and paradox of how they play out. “Jim the Plumber” narrates a humane encounter between Joe (who describes himself as a hippie) and a Vietnam vet. Or this, from “Plenty,” “When I meet the ‘nice young doctor,’ he introduces himself as Doctor Strimwick and calls me by my first name. Strike one.” Or “Plattsburgh Hillbillies,” in which Cottonwood tells of the white ex-con who uses the n-word but then takes up with an African-American woman. When the neighbors say they wouldn’t know what to say to “somebody like that,” Cottonwood replies, “‘I just talk’ . . . I couldn’t imagine cutting myself off from that much of the world.”
I loved the honesty of “The Road Not Taken,” in which he tells of his yearning -- just for a moment -- to leave his family and flee to the ease of pipeline work in Alaska without family responsibilities, but then -- as we knew he would -- buys the yogurt and laundry soap his wife has asked him to pick up. And I love his honesty about himself -- for example, in “Brotherhood of the Sidewalk,” when his brother backs him against neighbors complaining about a truck parked in their way. Afterwards his brother says, “You shouldn’t have blocked the sidewalk” and Joe replies, “I know.” In “The Bill,” he shows the ways in which we can all become someone we don’t recognize, “There is no redeeming way to end this story. Physical work isn’t just physical. There are personalities involved. Personal chemistry. The wrong mix can explode.”
He captures the preciousness of daily moments: daughter throwing up first thing in the morning, a cut finger and a tarantula bite in the afternoon, returning home to a furnace on fire, yet “we still have a house. We still have our lives. It will be a day of cleanup, hot chocolate, warm jackets; but the sunshine feels cheerful, and, really, you never know what will happen next, do you?”
Toward the end of the book, Cottonwood reflects on his own life and writing, how he would rather have been a full-time writer if only it had paid all the bills. I wish, for his sake and as a pleased reader, that he’d had more time to write, too. But I can’t bring myself to wish he hadn’t done construction work at all, because then we wouldn’t have had these stories.
** Full disclosure: The author provided me a review copy after seeing my Review of Mike Rose's _The Mind at Work_ on Goodreads.**
May 26, 2014
I was slightly apprehensive about 99 Jobs, not sure whether it was something I’d enjoy or not. On one hand, I’ve found memoirs about ordinary people from different walks of life to be fascinating in the glimpses they give into those lives, helping give me a deeper understanding of a variety of people and, in theory, maybe making me a slightly better person. On the other hand, how well would you expect a typical carpenter, plumber, and all around handyman to be able to string words together? Hopefully better than I can drive a nail, replace shingles, or for that matter, string words together. It turns out Cottonwood isn’t your stereo-typical blue collar guy. (Maybe there is a lesson for me there.)
99 Jobs could be viewed as a series of vignettes, each telling the tale of a single job over his long career. Every “job” or chapter could stand alone. One of the first chapters, Junior Electrician, chronicles Joe’s job changing light bulbs on a college campus in St Louis. That he was also a student at that same college, eventually graduating and working as a computer operator, is one way he turned out not to be your typical handyman, eventually realizing that he preferred working with his hands, often outside exposed to the elements, rather than spending his workday in the sterile environment of the computer room.
However, taken together, the individual jobs or chapters form a coherent whole that paints a picture of Cottonwood as a person. Besides giving an idea of what the life of a handyman might be like, they’re also full of lessons about life and people well beyond just the nuts and bolts of Cottonwood’s work.
**Originally written for "Books and Pals" book blog. May have received a free review copy. **
99 Jobs could be viewed as a series of vignettes, each telling the tale of a single job over his long career. Every “job” or chapter could stand alone. One of the first chapters, Junior Electrician, chronicles Joe’s job changing light bulbs on a college campus in St Louis. That he was also a student at that same college, eventually graduating and working as a computer operator, is one way he turned out not to be your typical handyman, eventually realizing that he preferred working with his hands, often outside exposed to the elements, rather than spending his workday in the sterile environment of the computer room.
However, taken together, the individual jobs or chapters form a coherent whole that paints a picture of Cottonwood as a person. Besides giving an idea of what the life of a handyman might be like, they’re also full of lessons about life and people well beyond just the nuts and bolts of Cottonwood’s work.
**Originally written for "Books and Pals" book blog. May have received a free review copy. **
January 6, 2014
This is a thoroughly enjoyable series of what I assume are 99 essays (I didn't count them) ranging from one to several pages each, generally detailing the author's experiences in becoming (and being) a handyman, carpenter, plumber, electrician, and overall jack-of-many-trades in keeping houses in shape. Oh, and on the side he is a "mediocre" writer (adjective is his own). Well, I would upgrade the author's writing to "much better than mediocre," albeit not to "mind-blowing."
What he IS really good at is observing and sizing up people and his jobs. I loved the descriptions of his work and his clients, and regarding the latter his insights are fascinating. I appreciate how he respects his clients and doesn't expect them to know everything (or even anything) about a repair or construction job - there's no chip on the author's shoulder, so good on him.
The essays (vignettes?) are roughly in chronological order and are arranged into some sort of categories that really didn't make sense to me. I think putting these in "chron" order and ditching the categories would be helpful to the reader.
What he IS really good at is observing and sizing up people and his jobs. I loved the descriptions of his work and his clients, and regarding the latter his insights are fascinating. I appreciate how he respects his clients and doesn't expect them to know everything (or even anything) about a repair or construction job - there's no chip on the author's shoulder, so good on him.
The essays (vignettes?) are roughly in chronological order and are arranged into some sort of categories that really didn't make sense to me. I think putting these in "chron" order and ditching the categories would be helpful to the reader.
July 28, 2024
I love this book. I love Joe Cottonwood. This memoir of his days working as a carpenter is just wonderful. Always a writer, he dumped a computer job to become a carpenter-handyman to pay the bills and please his soul with the joy of jobs well done. His work and clients vary. One day he’s adding lights in a million dollar house, the next he’s replumbing a falling-down cottage. He tells of working for people who greet him naked, who expect him to accomplish the impossible, and who become lifelong friends. We follow him into attics and into narrow crawlspaces full of dirt and spiders, suffer with him through injuries and insufferable clients, and experience the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and wild storms that trash houses and create a lot of work. I’m especially charmed because my dad was a construction worker and because these stories take place in the Bay Area, where I grew up. Cottonwood has written nine novels for adults and children and two books of poetry, and hosts a monthly “lit night” in La Honda, California.
February 5, 2015
I am still reading this book, so cannot give it a full review. What I have read so far, I greatly enjoy. Like the author, my father was a jack-of-all-trades type of contractor, so the stories in this book remind me of the very real life altering stories my father used to tell. I look forward to finishing this book, and passing it around my family.
In compliance with FTC guidelines, I must disclose that I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.
In compliance with FTC guidelines, I must disclose that I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.
June 6, 2014
Taps right into the small gaps people leave between themselves when they interact. The insight and prose the author brings us with these shorts is astonishing at times. Highly recommended.
December 17, 2014
Such a different perspective...loved the writing style and stories. I have had many a "HANDYMAN" at my home...I wonder if I am in one of their journals...hmmm...that is a scary thought!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews