'Risky Living' Explores Dangerous Jobs in the Own Words of Workers

Reviewed by David M. Kinchen

It's no surprise that storm chasers, bull riders, coal miners, ironworkers, circus tiger trainers, Coast Guard rescue divers, alligator trappers and timber cutters are engaged in dangerous occupations, but Tom Jones includes a journalist  in the first-person accounts in his latest book, Risky Living: Interviews with the Men and Women Who Work the World's Most Dangerous Jobs (Skyhorse Publishing, 400 pages, $24.95).

Risky Living is in the tradition of Studs Terkel's Working  (1974), and it's the first work of oral history to concentrate solely on people who perform dangerous jobs every day and how they deal with it. Risky Living is a fascinating collection of candid and intimate conversations with 45 men and women who describe how physical risk is a constant companion in their working lives.

Washington Post Jerusalem Bureau correspondent Griff Witte tells Jones how he deals with the day-to-day hazards of reporting from a permanent war zone. Before moving to Jerusalem to cover Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, he covered Afghanistan and Pakistan, both extremely dangerous places for journalists. It was in Pakistan that Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and brutally murdered by Islamic terrorists in 2002. And -- just this week -- at least a dozen journalists were murdered in the strife-torn Philippine island of Mindanao.

Driving a cab in Chicago can be dangerous, John Kabakoff tells Jones, but the biggest hazard is other drivers, not people who want to rob him. He takes precautions about potential fares who might demand his money, but avoiding drivers chatting and texting on their cell phones in a city with horrendous traffic is much more difficult.

Anyone with the money to buy a chainsaw thinks he's qualified to cut timber, but veteran timber cutter Jerry Hurley (the picture accompanying the account shows a man with a serious Elvis Presley addiction!) says it's a job that requires years of experience and can be frightfully dangerous to a novice.

Gender is no barrier to dangerous jobs: Jones interviews women who face hazards daily, women like firefighter Melissa Steele, Louisiana alligator hunter Tredale Boudreaux, Coast Guard rescue swimmer Jodie Williams and tiger trainer Vicenta Pages.  Jones is that ideal interviewer, a person who makes his subjects comfortable and let them free associate. In his acknowledgments, Jones tells us that the tape recorded interviews were transcribed in Bangalore, India....showing how everything is outsourced these days.

Jones takes us:

• Inside Antron Brown’s car as he launches his top fuel drag racer from zero to over 300 miles per hour
• Alongside world champion bull rider Justin McBride as he attempts to stay atop a 1,600-pound beast
• Next to storm chasing videographer Jeff Gammons as he painfully remembers the screams of Hurricane Katrina drowning victims
• Right behind Cameron Begbie as he recalls fighting hand-to-hand against insurgents in Iraq
• Inside the huddle with two-time Pro Bowl NFL player Kassim Osgood
• In the back of the jeep with free-lance wildlife photographer Andy Casagrande
• Down the shaft with Pennsylvania underground coal miner Jeff Shiner
• 100 stories up with high-rise Chicago window washer Walter Diaz

Tom Jones worked for thirty years as a legislative director in the administrations of the last five California governors negotiating new laws and testifying before the state’s Senate and Assembly. His first book, Working at the Ballpark, was published in 2008. You'll find him online at www.tomjonesbooks.com

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