Overview
"""Idle Hands"" offers a major social history of unemployment in Britain over the last 200 years. It focuses on the experiences of working people in becoming unemployed, coping with unemployment and searching for work, and their reactions and responses to their problems. Direct evidence of the impact of unemployment is drawn from extensive personal biographies."
Full Product Details
Author: Proffessor John Burnett ,
John Burnett
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint: Routledge
Dimensions:
Width: 15.60cm
, Height: 2.40cm
, Length: 23.40cm
Weight: 0.589kg
ISBN: 9780415055017
ISBN 10: 0415055016
Pages: 380
Publication Date: 30 June 1994
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Undergraduate
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
`... he has produced a vivid, moving and highly readable account of victimisation and suffering, reslilence and generosity, hope and despair.' - News Statesman & Society `John Burnett will always be known as the pioneer of the history of working people in their own words. He has opened up an Aladdins's cave of historical treasures and transformed working class history from a dry account of wages, prices and institutions into a real human world of warm-blooded people... a splendid book ... ' - Social History Society Newsletter `He has produced a vivid, moving and highly readable account of victimisation and suffering, resilience and generosity, hope and despair.' - New Statesman and Society `The strength of this book lies in the sense it gives of the economic and social continuities that mark the history of unemployment.' - David Selbourne The Times Higher
`... he has produced a vivid, moving and highly readable account of victimisation and suffering, reslilence and generosity, hope and despair.' - News Statesman & Society `John Burnett will always be known as the pioneer of the history of working people in their own words. He has opened up an Aladdins's cave of historical treasures and transformed working class history from a dry account of wages, prices and institutions into a real human world of warm-blooded people... a splendid book ... ' - Social History Society Newsletter `He has produced a vivid, moving and highly readable account of victimisation and suffering, resilience and generosity, hope and despair.' - New Statesman and Society `The strength of this book lies in the sense it gives of the economic and social continuities that mark the history of unemployment.' - David Selbourne The Times Higher
Burnett uses vivid quotations from his extensive knowledge of working-class autobiographies to bring to life what could have been a dryish subject, prone as it is to attract official statistics and pious moralizing. He reveals the impact of being out of work on ordinary lives, 'not what happened but how people felt about it when it was happening'. Our postwar years of full employment were, it seems, exceptional and historically untypical; never before have so many young people been unemployed for so long. Unless work is shared more, Burnett concludes, the devil will find mischief for idle hands. (Kirkus UK)
