Hidden America: From Coal Miners to Cowboys, an Extraordinary Exploration of the Unseen People Who Make This Country Work

Laskas is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and the writer and narrator of the book. Though she tries to remove herself and her opinions from the text as much as possible in order to present the workers she meets and a description of the work that they do as objectively as she can, many of the sections are nonetheless colored by her personality.

What is most noticeable about Laskas are her empathy and curiosity. Indeed, no matter how she might feel about the body shaming that seems to be part and parcel of work as an NFL cheerleader or how the clerks at Sprague’s Sports ignore the victims of gun violence, she is able to allow her curiosity about the experiences of others to guide her exploration throughout the project.

Her empathy is evident from the information that her subjects share with her. She is able to befriend people from backgrounds very different from her own, and she presents them in a positive light. There are no villains in this text, with the possible exceptions of the nameless supervisors and government officials who make life hard for the workers Laskas studies.