Since 1997, the webzine word.com has featured a weekly column called "Work," wherein people speak frankly about what they do for a paycheck. The bulk of these columns comprise Gig, an addictive anthology that bears the understated subtitle, "Americans Talk About Their Jobs At The Turn Of The Millennium." "Talk" barely describes it, because what these Americans really do is hoot, howl, and harangue. A UPS driver launches into a profanity-laced confession of how he jerks around his customers and spends most of his day goofing off. A human-resources director at a slaughterhouse seems on the verge of hysteria as she describes how difficult it is to find people who want to gut cows for a living. A stripper discusses how her job has bled into her civilian life, making every interaction with the opposite sex seem like a business transaction. Gig can be read out of order, sampled indiscriminately, but each monologue is so compelling and surprising that it's difficult to resist pushing straight through. And the book gains from this approach, not just because the jobs have been arranged by related topics such as "Food" and "Media," but because when the stories are strung together, certain trends emerge. People get out of school and take jobs they don't want, and though they find ways to keep their humor and imagination, most are eyeing a dream job somewhere else, away from the obstinate people and time-wasting tasks that make daily labor so laborious. Gig was inspired by the unobtrusive oral history pioneered by Studs Terkel, and in that vein, the interviewers keep their questions off the printed page, letting the anecdotes of the interviewee proceed uninterrupted. Because the reader remains unaware of what was asked, the biases of the journalist are kept invisible, which means an important piece of this era-defining puzzle is absent. But a bounty of useful insight and reflection remains. Anyone who's ever worked a shift at a seemingly pointless job will recognize the little swells of pride over acquired specialized knowledge, the gripes about blindly capricious bosses, and the near-universal derision of the idea that "the customer is always right." The whole of Gig impressively depicts the modern service economy, where workers feel superior to the work they do and the people for whom they do it—who, it is often forgotten, have annoying jobs of their own.