A brilliantly bawdy, raucous and disreputable account of working for The Man and redeeming a brutish, dissolute life through art. I quite liked Dustin Hoffmann's One Hundred Knuckled Fist (a 2017 Michigan Notable Books honoree, I might add), but Bukowski's visceral, plainspoken, and, yes, frequently repulsive and regressive, account of life at the lowest rungs of the civil service system rings truer, and might just be better recognized as documentary truth by the workers in the system than Hoffmann's explicitly "literary" account of blue-collar work. Braid with Studs Terkel's Working and a generous helping of Harvey Pekar's American Splendor to create a mosaic of a particular moment in the American class and employment system.