Families on the Fault Line: America's Working Class Speaks About the Family, the Economy, Race,and Ethnicity ―Inside the Hearts and Minds of America's Working-Class Families

by Lillian B. Rubin

An up-close and intimate look inside the lives, hearts, and minds of America's working-class families.

Genres: Sociology, Nonfiction, Class

304 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1994

Reviews

[Pam]

I read this for a college class. Nonfiction, but I remember being really absorbed in it. It probably shaped my perspective on life at least in small part.

read: 8/4/1995
entered into good reads: 6/7/2015

[Kristine]

Point: The US has never been as open and welcoming to immigrants as the cultural fable of the Statue of Liberty poem suggests. We’ve resisted every wave of them, but everyone except African Americans have eventually transcended that status and gotten into mainstream life. When the economy sours, absent a vocabulary of class difference, working class families turn on their racial vocabulary; claims of ethnic identity in the 1980’s and 90’s elided ethnicity and race and rhetorically enabled white privilege further, despite earnest attempts to question and unseat it. Big claims about systematic interviews and some scholarly citations along the way (most from popular media), but no real way to see this as a scholarly book. A good read at times, though.

[Michelle]

If you are interested in Sociology, then you will like her books.

[Jackie]

It was interesting. I enjoyed learning about the different families and their various backgrounds. Again assigned for school ha.