Not that I've read a lot of books about labor law, but this is the most well-written book about the experience of practicing labor law I've ever read, a sort of ground-level counterpart to the labor-market sections of Krugman's book. I once read an Amazon review for another one of Geoghegan's books that claimed that all of his books were really about citizenship in one form or another, and I agree with that. This one focuses on the damage that conservative policies did to the traditional American understanding of citizenship during the 1980s, specifically that of the Chicagoland union members that were being fired in droves as structural shifts in the economy (both natural and planned) eliminated their jobs and their places in society under the guise of the "invisible hand" while the corporations who cheerfully outsourced their jobs made huge profits. Geoghegan is witty and self-deprecating as he recognizes the futility of reversing or even slowing the massive hemorrhaging of jobs, and he pulls no punches in recounting the resulting ugly fratricide as these desperate unions relentlessly and inscrutably destroyed themselves as they lost everything they had. Somehow I ended up reading a lot of anti-Reagan books this year, and this was the second-most vitriolic out of the lot.
