Working In The Shadows

A Year of Doing the Jobs Americans Won't Do

By Gabriel Thompson

What is it like to do the back-breaking work of immigrants? To find out, Gabriel Thompson spent a year working alongside Latino immigrants who initially thought he was either crazy or an undercover immigration agent. Combining personal narrative with investigative reporting, Thompson shines a bright light on the underside of the American economy, exposing harsh working conditions, union busting and lax government enforcement—while telling the stories of workers, undocumented immigrants and desperate U.S. citizens alike, forced to live with chronic back pain in the pursuit of $8 an hour.

Watch Thompson on C-SPAN's Book TV on March 20-21. More

El Monstruo: Book Tour

February 11 - April 13 | Across the United States
Get your copy of El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City signed by Nation Books author John Ross, who is traveling across the United States on a mammoth book tour spanning three months and 20 cities. Click here to see if he's coming to a city near you.

February 11 - May 14
Photo Exhibit by Eugene Richards
(Gage Gallery, Roosevelt University, 18 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL)
Institute Fellow and award-winning photographer Eugene Richards is showing his work, A Procession of Them, at Roosevelt University's Gage Gallery from February 11 through May 14. The exhibit features troubling black-and-white images of mentally ill and mentally disabled patients who are warehoused in deplorable conditions in psychiatric institutions around the world. MORE

March 20 - 21
Gabriel Thompson on C-SPAN's Book TV
(C-SPAN)
Watch Gabriel Thompson, Nation Books author of Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs Most Americans Won't Do on C-SPAN's Book TV on March 20-21. MORE

March 27 | 3:30 pm
Investigative Reporting/FOIA for Feminists panel
(Hive 55, 55 Broad Street, New York)
Join Investigative Fund Editor Esther Kaplan as she discusses investigative reporting with fellow panelists Lindsay Beyerstein, Heather Haddon and Deepa Fernandes (who is also an IFUND reporter). MORE

April 8 | 7 pm
A World Without Nuclear Weapons: Obama's Vision, Our Mission
(New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 West 64th Street, New York City)
Join our panel of leading experts—Jonathan Schell, Daniel Ellsberg and Kennette Benedict—in a wide-ranging and incisive conversation moderated by Phil Donahue on the ongoing international struggle for the containment and eventual reduction of the nuclear threat, and how President Obama and the U.S. Senate can be pushed to fulfill the promise of a world without nuclear weapons. This important public conversation is occurring in the run-up to the UN’s regular review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that will take place on May 1, 2010. MORE