Barbara Ehrenreich’s latest is titled This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation.
According to the NYT, the author: “She has 15 books listed on her credit page, 6 of them in collaboration with others: not so much a writer as a writer’s collective. They tackle matters like the struggle of service workers to make do on miserable pay, the hollow offerings of the career advice-and-placement industry, the middle class’s fear of falling, men’s inability to commit, the historical flimflamming of women and much more.”
Publishers Weekly notes: “Her passion, compassion and wit keep these excursions lively and timely—even when yesterday's headlines provide the immediate provocation, e.g., JetBlue's snow snafu. The vignettes go down a bit like eating peanuts—too many at one time palls, but they're not unhealthy, unless you have an allergic reaction to Ehrenreich's message: America is being polarized between the superrich few and the subrich everyone else. Entertaining Ehrenreich certainly is, but she raises a hard, serious question: How many 'wake-up calls' do we need, people...?”
The NYT not only provides a review, but a first chapter excerpt.
Metropolitan Books is the publisher, and as the product description states:
“Taking the measure of what we are left with after the cruelest decade in memory, Ehrenreich finds lurid extremes all around. While members of the moneyed elite can buy congressmen, many in the working class can barely buy lunch. While a wealthy minority obsessively consumes cosmetic surgery, the poor often go without health care for their children. And while the corporate C-suites are now nests of criminality, the less fortunate are fed a diet of morality, marriage, and abstinence. Ehrenreich’s antidotes are as sardonic as they are spot-on: pet insurance for your kids; Salvation Army fashions for those who can no longer afford Wal-Mart; and boundless rage against those who have given us a nation scarred by deepening inequality, corroded by distrust, and shamed by its official cruelty.”
Click here for he NYT review.
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