Lubrano, Alfred

Limbo : Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams

Limbo is a thought provoking treatise on the lasting consequences of class mobility in America. Drawing on his own story as well as on dozens more from individuals who share his experience, award winning journalist Alfred Lubrano sheds light on the predicament of some 13 million Americans: reconciling their blue collar upbringing with the white collar world they now inhabit. The son of a Brooklyn bricklayer, Lubrano came of age in a neighborhood imbued with typical working class values like the importance of hard work, loyalty to family and community, and a healthy respect for religion. Academically gifted, he attended Columbia, and went on to achieve professional success as a reporter. But he quickly found that the lessons he had absorbed in childhood would not serve him as well as the upper class gifts of subtlety, diplomacy, and cultural capital–leaving him strangely isolated from both his workplace peers and the world he’d left behind. Unfamiliar with the rules of upper class life, which serves as the model for corporate culture, the "Straddlers" (as Lubrano dubs them) find themselves ill equipped for that buttoned down world. Yet they share Lubrano’s ambiguity, and their choices frequently challenge the philosophical and moral assumptions of working class life. Combining personal stories with the latest thinking from leading experts, Limbo offers a unique blend of deeply felt first person confessional and sociological study that is both profoundly affecting and rigorously informed. Though it wholly dismisses the widely held notion that class is a dead subject in America, it avoids cynicism and easy judgment, seeking only to provide a glimpse at what lies beneath our social and cultural fabric. The profiles here show a remarkable consistency of emotion and experience across a diverse demographic that crosses all boundaries of sex, race, and religion. Opening a long awaited dialogue, Limbo reflects the reality of a unique class struggling with an all American brand of cultural isolation. There is something for everyone in these honest and eloquent stories of life in our modern meritocracy.