Out of the Jungle: Jimmy Hoffa and the Remaking of the American Working Class

"Jimmy Hoffa was president and that was it. We never gave it a hell of a lot of thought...When the government came after him a lot of us wanted to take our trucks and run 'em over certain people," reflects a truck driver in Thaddeus Russell's new biography of Jimmy Hoffa. Leader of the Teamsters, one of America's largest and most powerful unions, Hoffa dominated American labor for more than a quarter of a century. Russell, a historian at Barnard College, takes a new approach by looking at Hoffa as a product of a 'multitude of social forces.' Russell concentrates his efforts on examining those forces that formed Hoffa and his union members, chief among them the desire to improve their standard of living.