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Bad Jobs and Poor Decisions by J. R. Helton
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Bad Jobs and Poor Decisions

Dispatches from the Working Class

$31.49

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Narrator A.T. Chandler

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Length 7 hours 26 minutes
Language English
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Weaving the brackish humor of Chuck Palahniuk with the empathy of Barbara Ehrenreich, J. R. Helton brings to life an obscured underside of the American psyche in this unflinching account of life inside the working class of Texas in the 1980s. We first meet Helton as a struggling writer succumbing to the bleak reality of what it means to support himself and a wife. That despair is transformed into resilience as Helton insightfully narrates his wayward years, enduring hateful employers and mind-numbing manual labor. Along the way, he introduces us to the real people toiling beneath the saccharine veneer of wealth that was the Reagan years: the ambitious and the lazy, the potheads and racists—as well as Vietnam vets too shaken to hold a paintbrush, deadbeat fathers straining to pay child support, and the casual murderer. Raw and moving, Bad Jobs and Poor Decisions captures a microcosm of tattered America that straddles that dangerous line between ruin and redemption.

J. R. Helton has published numerous books about movies, drugs, people, and dogs. A writing teacher in Texas, his stories and poems have been featured in Mineshaft magazine, the Sun, and the Missouri Review, among others.

A. T. Chandler is an AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator with numerous credits to his name, in genres ranging from nonfiction, mystery, thrillers, young adult, and science fiction. An accomplished voice actor, his most notable role is in the Anime sensation Dragonball Z. As the son of English and history teachers and grandson of a librarian, books have been a part of his world from birth. An actor from the age of nine, he brings decades of stage and screen performance experience to his audiobook narrations. He currently lives in Dallas, Texas.

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Limited-time offer

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