Amazon.com description: Product Description: "Idle Hands" is a major social history of unemployment in Britain over the last 200 years. It focuses on the experiences of working people in becoming unemployed, coping with unemployment and searching for work, and their reactions and responses to their problems. Direct evidence of the impact of unemployment is drawn from extensive personal biographies. The author has also published "Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet in England From 1815 to the Present" (Routledge, 1989); "A History of the Cost of Living" (1969); "The Challenge of the Nineteenth Century" (1970); "Useful Toil" (1974); and "Destiny Obscure" (1994).