Every day brings the startling and depressing headlines: "AT&T's Call: 40,000 Out"; "Delta Will Cut Up to 15,000 Jobs"; "IBM Chief Making Drastic New Cuts: 35,000 Jobs to Go"; "Sears Kills Catalog: 50,000 Jobs, 113 Stores Eliminated." The numbers add up: Since 1979, more than 43 million jobs have vanished. And while many more have been created, increasingly, the jobs that are disappearing are those of higher-paid, white-collar workers, and many of the new jobs pay much less than those they replaced.

What is going on? To find out, The New York Times sent a team of reporters across the country, to interview workers and managers and owners alike, to see how they have survived the economic storms that have left a trail of anguish and upheaval. Their report, after a six-month investigation, originally appeared in a critically acclaimed seven-part series in The New York Times.

Now, expanded as a book, The Downsizing of America makes for riveting reading. It puts a human face on a historic predicament that is as ubiquitous as it is painful. It is a revealing look at an America in which the rules of the game seem to be drastically changed.