Just ask for the online or email edition. Every exit is an entry somewhere else. I could identify fairly easily with the author because I also had graduate school degrees, I had come from a similar background, and I had been for several years a college teacher. His journey from denial into depression, however, was almost completely incomprehensible to me. I realized that after over a dozen years in the business world, I had let go of a lot of illusions I had once held as an academic.
Personal memoirs are selective in their choice of details.
And Snyder seems to choose the worst to reveal about himself the immaturity, his overwhelming reliance on his long-suffering young wife, his snobbery, egotism, and sentimentality. I found nothing inspiring about any of this, though I did read his story to the end, with something like the impulse you have to stop and stare at an awful highway accident. In the closing chapters, release and self-knowledge finally come, almost as a gift from a merciful deity. I felt tears welling in my eyes when Snyder at last discovers a new life for himself as a working man, husband, and father. He seems to find an honesty that is reflected in the manual labor he eventually embraces, in the clarity of his new vision, and in what he says to others about himself and about work itself.