Under the impact of neoliberal policies in the early 1990s, the rise in education opportunities and the reduction in available employment in the public sector have resulted in an increase in social expectations and, on the other, in a decrease in social opportunities for social mobility. In Ethiopia, similarly to other countries across the continent, such a disjuncture is a dramatic reality in the lives of those young people with secondary education and university degrees who aspire for government jobs. Nowadays, as studies on labour in Ethiopia have already pointed out, aspiring for a job in the public sector has often a significant effect on the probability of being unemployed.

With a focus on the life of educated unemployed youth in Jimma, southern Ethiopia, Mains disentangles those connections that exist between unemployment, social aspirations and hope. In his ethnography, Mains takes the reader to an exploration of how educated young men deal with cultural concerns over status, experience unemployment and maintain grounds for hope.

Mains firstly provides an interpretation of the reasons why educated young people prefer queuing for jobs in the public sector rather than engaging in the private sector or in the informal economy. Unemployment, he argues, is not only a matter of absence of work. Rather, young people's decisions towards employment in Ethiopia are best characterised as embedded in cultural notions concerning status, relations and social hierarchy. In fact, even though the private sector provides better economic opportunities, young people continue to aspire for government posts because working in the public sector would position them at the higher levels of the local hierarchy of social relations.

Secondly, Mains suggests that unemployment is not a simply a synonym for inactivity. Chewing khat, a mild stimulant that is consumed across East African and Yemen, and watching movies, offer educated unemployed youth with a way of passing time and, more importantly, of (re)constructing hope. While passing time, possible lives are imagined.

With a similar perspective, Mains explores how dealing with unemployment also consists of particular social and economic practices. For instance, asking how unemployed young men always seemed to have a bit of money in their pockets, he examines the economy of gifts and exchanges that enabled some of the young men to avoid low-status occupation, and have access to a form of wealth that boosted their social position among their peers. Through gifts and exchanges, young people produced new ways of experiencing and conceptualising status and, at the same time, reproduced existing forms of social differentiation. Indeed, Mains shows, the ability of unemployed young men to successfully participate in these exchanges often correlated with specific patterns of social stratification: class, residence and the quality and the quantity of networks their families had access to.

Mains' book is without doubts a very interesting one but also has its weaknesses. His examination of status, for instance, appears more drawn on the existing literature on Ethiopia than on his own ethnographic material. Similarly, he sometimes refers only too quickly to existing patterns of social differentiation in the neighbourhoods where he conducted his fieldwork. On the other, his ethnographic examination of the everyday life of the unemployed youth and, in particular, his analysis of gifts and exchanges are most valuable.

With this book, Mains has surely become a reference in the debate on youth in the continent. Moreover, his account of the unemployed youth in Jimma constitutes an important contribution to refresh the ethnographic imagination of Ethiopian studies, bearing witness to the fact that cultural and social dynamics in urban areas cannot be fully understood under an exclusive lens of ethnicity and ethnic differences.