Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams [Paperback]

Alfred Lubrano (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 22, 2005 | ISBN-10: 0471714399 | ISBN-13: 978-0471714392 | Edition: 1

In Limbo, award-winning journalist Alfred Lubrano identifies and describes an overlooked cultural phenomenon: the internal conflict within individuals raised in blue-collar homes, now living white-collar lives. These people often find that the values of the working class are not sufficient guidance to navigate the white-collar world, where unspoken rules reflect primarily upper-class values. Torn between the world they were raised in and the life they aspire too, they hover between worlds, not quite accepted in either. Himself the son of a Brooklyn bricklayer, Lubrano informs his account with personal experience and interviews with other professionals living in limbo. For millions of Americans, these stories will serve as familiar reminders of the struggles of achieving the American Dream.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Lubrano's view of the challenges that upwardly mobile children of blue-collar families (he calls them Straddlers) face in establishing themselves in white-collar enclaves could spark lively debates among Straddlers themselves, not to mention those Lubrano views as having a head start based on birth into a white-collar family. In this combination of memoir and survey, the Philadelphia Inquirer staff reporter recalls his freshman year at Columbia; he'd expected classmates to regard him as sophisticated because he was a New Yorker. However, this son of a Brooklyn bricklayer found himself on the outside of elite cliques populated by men he characterizes as "pasty, slight fellas-all of them seemed 5-foot-7 and sandy-haired." This was only the beginning for Lubrano, who came to see entry into a select educational institution as a harsh cultural dividing line between his blue-collar upbringing and his white-collar future. Becoming a journalist cost him emotionally when he felt torn between abandoning cherished values from his youth and accommodating his new profession's demands. Lubrano's interviews with other Straddlers have convinced him that ambition puts many of them in positions fraught with similar ambivalence and unexpected culture shock. With quotes from Richard Rodriguez and bell hooks, Lubrano illustrates his thesis: "Limbo folk remain aware of their `otherness' throughout their lives [and remain] perpetual outsiders." Yet he's quick to recognize individual Straddlers who've persevered in the face of those outsider feelings (though, regrettably, he doesn't share self-reflection). Straddlers' ultimate challenge, Lubrano opines, is to be as steadfast and self-possessed in reconciling their white-collar present with their blue-collar heritage as they have been in achieving their professional goals.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

This country always celebrates the idea that there is enormous opportunity here to move up from one's station in life, to achieve greatness from the most humble of roots. But for those who are the first from a traditionally blue-collar family to enter college and move into the white-collar workplace, there is a darker side to success when they find themselves alienated from both their own family and their strange new middle-class world. Lubrano, himself an Italian American son of a bricklayer who transcended his roots to become an award-winning journalist, wrote this book in an attempt to reconcile this dichotomy and explore the unique challenges of this transitional social class. Interspersed with his own story are the stories of more than 100 others whom he calls "Straddlers" because they straddle two worlds, "many of them not feeling at home in either, living in a kind of American limbo." This is an emotionally charged study of class values, a subject even touchier than race or gender. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 248 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (February 22, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471714399
• ISBN-13: 978-0471714392
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 0.7 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (61 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #124,103 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

52 of 53 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Class in America - the elephant in the living room February 6, 2004

By Patrick M. Marchman

Format:Hardcover

I have to agree with what lots of other people have written - this book is one of the most affecting I've ever read. Not so much because of any special power or artistry in the writing, but because of an empathy that comes from Lubrano's pen for all of us who've grown up and who still live between classes in the supposedly classless society that is America.

My parents grew up in dire poverty (from Newfoundland and Georgia respectively), and reacted against it by trying to "bleach" themselves - and me - to an impossible Ozzy & Harriet standard. They never lost many of those working-class values that Lubrano talks about, however, and so the pretenses of middle-class life always coexisted uncomfortably with their fundamental beliefs and experiences. Growing up, I rejected a lot of my upbringing and tried to blend in with what I saw as "sophistication". But for all my striving, I never was taught the "secret handshake" that my peers from middle and upper-class backgrounds used daily.

As a graduate student, those class differences between me and my peers and professors are even more obvious and acute, and it made graduate school, at least for a while, seem somewhat hostile. I heard about "Limbo" on NPR at exactly the time when I felt most disconnected, and it made me feel like I wasn't alone.

If nothing else, this book lets "Straddlers" know that no, we aren't alone. There's a lot more of us than anyone realizes. And we have overcome a lot - not only our upbringing, but the corners of society we most want to join but which demand as the price of admission an abandonment of everything we are....
Maybe the blue-collar world we grew up in still has something to give - the warmth, the humor, the strength, the straightforwardness - something that all the Thai restaurants, backpacking trips to Europe and Dave Matthews yuppie-fests can't replace. Read more ›

50 of 51 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars At long last... November 25, 2003

By Gina Marie Antonelli

Format:Hardcover

This is a book that really resonated with me. Having grown up in a blue-collar family, it has helped me understand an uneasy, unnameable feeling I've carried with me my whole life. As a child, they called me "encyclopedia." When I graduated from college, my working class family and neighborhood seemed more distant than ever. People called me "Professor" and made fun of the way I spoke. When I began working, that turned out to be no picnic either. Everyone around me dressed and acted differently. They seemed to have all grown up in tennis whites, having "coming out" parties, and living a far easier life. I've never spent much time thinking about "class" in relation to my career, but "Limbo" gets to the heart of what I've been feeling all these years. It's been not only fascinating, but, in an odd way, liberating as well. (You know, once you no longer feel as if you're the only one....) Few books I've ever read have offered the kind of insight that Mr. Lubrano has brought to this important subject. I thank him for this book.

34 of 34 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Revelatory. A Must-Read for those Who Crossed the Divide May 6, 2004

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

Al Lubrano deserves the collective thanks of all of us who have crossed the formidable class divide for writing such a revealing exposition on class in America. This book is not some abstruse academic treatise on social conditions. It is a very readable insight on what it is like to cross from the working-class world to that of the college-educated professional, written by a keen-eyed, nose-to-the-ground news reporter.

The other reviews here capture well the essence of Lubrano's message on the challenges "Straddlers" face in their difficult journey across class lines. I particularly value his commentary on cultural capital -- "the collective
advantages of the middle and upper classes."

I, too, am an Italian-American rooted in the working class who transitioned to the Ivy League (also Columbia) and, from there, into the elitist, very WASPy, upper & upper middle class U.S. Foreign Service. I, too, have confronted obliqueness in professional relations and bureaucratic treachery, blatant self-promotion by colleagues and the assumption by my fellow diplomats that they are the heirs of success. But it is the class tribalism that has proven so fascinating and mysterious to me. Assignments to the choicest diplomatic posts (particularly in W. Europe) always seem to be traded among the same group of friends; fast promotions largely go a pre-selected cabal of fair-haired boys and girls who are inducted early on into a select circle of like-minded people largely from the same kind of social bacground: college-educated parents, suburban/urban-bred, upper middle class or higher, usually WASP....

I found that inclusion of "he marches to his own drum" in my personnel evaluations proved to be not commendatory, but damning in that peculiarly indirect way white-collar professionals can be. As a blue-collar type whose father didn't complete high school, I was clueless starting out as to the secret social codes, nuanced manner of speaking and honed, behind-the-scenes schmoozing required to be tacitly accepted as part of the Club. At the same time, my family regards me as some sort of mutant who has been transformed into something unrecognizable by a world that is very alien to them.

I have recommended Lubrano's book to the small handful of other diplomatic colleagues I know who are also "Straddlers." This has sparked a lively exchange sharing experiences and views. One reaction we all have in common is how much Lubrano's book has opened our eyes. The "Aha!" factor features prominantly in our discussions.

As Cassius said, "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves." The blue-collar denizen seeking to ensconce him/herself in the white collar professional world faces deeper obstacles than appears at first on the surface. While we face disadvantages in advancement by dint of our origins, we nonetheless greatly benefit from the down-home values with which we are brought up. It is a subject well worth further exploration and Lubrano has helped open up a new vista for us all. Read more ›

34 of 35 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An apt description of an ignored story May 1, 2004

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

Lubrano tells a story that has been largely ignored - well, ignored when it is not mythologized. U.S. culture loves the Horatio Alger myth, the idea of individuals who, despite lives spent in abject poverty, pull themselves up by the bootstraps and become wildly successful (and usually wealthy), more successful than the peers and naysayers who never had to grapple with such struggles.

Though we love the myth, we haven't talked much--until now--about what the class-straddling process is really like. This may be because the experience has not happened, or rather, that the conditions for the class-straddling experience have existed only rarely until now. A generation of blue-collar parents (many of them first-generation American-born or immigrants) have raised children who have attended college and/or graduate school, something of a new phenomenon.

It is fascinating to read Lubrano's work, because he describes the reality of the experience of upward mobility, but more aptly of class-straddling, and it is so different from the mythic version. Some of us knew this, but it's nice to see it in print.

"Limbo" stands on its own merits--great storytelling, poignant and critical without seeming whiney, and captured details that do more to convey an experience in one sentence than some writers can in an entire chapter--but I'd be remiss if I left my personal lens out of this review. I found this book just as I was completing my M.S. and beginning my Ph.D. I am not in the Ivy League, but do attend a very good, private university with a more-than-decent reputation. I wish Lubrano had written "Limbo" while I was in college, but am grateful that he wrote it at all....

My parents (a tool and die maker and an elementary school secretary) could not afford to pay for any portion of my undergraduate education - neither tuition nor living expenses. I qualified for scanty and sporadically available merit-based financial aid, but--despite earning just $18,000 per year before taxes--I never once qualified for need-based financial aid. I felt like an outcast in college: I had just one other friend (another girl from a working-class background just like mine, still one of my closest friends and now an M.A.) who worked fulltime and attended college fulltime, like I did.

I believed so much in a meritocracy, until I realized how a university's entire structure is based on the ability of its students to be there fulltime, and during the day - during working hours, for those of us who have worked since we were 15. As a college student who had to work fulltime in order to cover living expenses, buy textbooks, etc., having to select from limited evening and summer classes, or work from 6 PM until 3 AM in order to be able to attend classes during the day, made the college experience very, very different from the one most other people had.

I was constantly asked, by classmates as well as professors who enjoyed my enthusiasm and high grades in their classes, why I wasn't "more involved", why I couldn't attend brown-bag lunch lectures, late Friday afternoon faculty colloquia, and all the other fun meetings that make a college experience so truly intellectual and enjoyable (newspaper meetings, academic journal meetings, political clubs, etc.). And forget meetings - when you have to work, try even making it to a professor's "open office" hours. Though I graduated with honors within five years, several professors told me that I had to "find a way to stop working" so I could "focus more on school." It's a nice, well-intentioned sentiment, and believe me, there's nothing I would have liked more, but it also conveyed the idea that work and education should not or cannot co-exist, and that trying to make them both fit just couldn't work.

Dating was a miserable experience, meeting boys whose parents bought them houses on campus as investment properties, and who have no qualms about telling you that you're the smartest, coolest person they've met, but could never date you seriously, because, well, my parents "weren't anyone" to their parents. Like another reviewer whose father was a painter, I too remember aghast expressions when a boyfriend's mother (to my mind, a lazy stay-at-home, kept woman who frittered away her husband's earnings on daily trips to the salon and Botox injections and pretended to ignore his affairs with his interns) learned that my mother was an elementary school secretary. It was "so unfortunate" that my mother "had to work" because my "father couldn't support her properly". Funny, I used to think the rich had manners. No more.

Lubrano truly understands so much of the complexity of these experiences, and so much more. He is not afraid to write about the bittersweet experience of academic success in the face of families who may not understand it, or who have not had educational opportunities themselves. As I now pursue my Ph.D., still working fulltime and attending school on a part-time basis, but publishing and conducting research, I can't describe what it is like to talk with my father, still working at a factory, on his feet all day, with a small 401(k) and no possiblity of a pension - a MENSA member (no kidding) who is treated with nothing but disrespect by those who are not nearly as intelligent or hardworking as he is. How do I resign what, in comparison, seems to be a self-indulgent pursuit of education with the guilt I feel for doing well at it? It's absolutely unbearable sometimes, and now I know that at least a few other people understand it - Alfred Lubrano, my friend from college with her M.A., and a few reviewers of "Limbo" on Amazon.com.

While I of course recommend this book to everyone, it is nothing short of a Godsend for working-class students and academics from blue-collar backgrounds, at the undergraduate, graduate, and professorship levels of academic pursuit. Read more ›