[PDF] Nickeled And Dimed To Death eBook

Author : Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher : Metropolitan Books
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 38,67 MB
Release : 2010-04-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1429926643

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The New York Times bestselling work of undercover reportage from our sharpest and most original social critic, with a new foreword by Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job—any job—can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you int to live indoors. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity—a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. And now, in a new foreword, Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, explains why, twenty years on in America, Nickel and Dimed is more relevant than ever.

Author : Denise Swanson
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 177 pages
File Size : 44,28 MB
Release : 2013-03-05
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1101604093

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In New York Times bestselling author Denise Swanson’s “slightly zany”* new mystery series, Devereaux Sinclair loves running her old-fashioned store in her small Missouri hometown. If only murder didn’t keep landing on her doorstep… Dev’s five-and-dime may be doing well, but her love life is in turmoil. She’s torn between Deputy U.S. Marshal Jake Del Vecchio, who is on an undercover assignment, and her ex-beau Noah Underwood, the local doctor from a high-society family. So she welcomes the distraction when Elise Whitmore offers her a great deal on antique chocolate molds that would be perfect for her Easter gift baskets. But do the molds actually belong to Elise’s soon-to-be ex-husband? In buying them, has Dev committed a felony? When Elise is found shot to death, the mystery deepens—and Dev’s good friend Boone, who discovered the body, is taken into custody. With the help of her best buds, Dev must clear Boone’s name and find the real killer. Good thing that when it comes to amateur sleuths, they broke the mold with Dev Sinclair. *Library Journal

Author : Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher : Twelve
Page : 218 pages
File Size : 25,14 MB
Release : 2018-04-10
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1455535885

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From the celebrated author of Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich explores how we are killing ourselves to live longer, not better. A razor-sharp polemic which offers an entirely new understanding of our bodies, ourselves, and our place in the universe, Natural Causes describes how we over-prepare and worry way too much about what is inevitable. One by one, Ehrenreich topples the shibboleths that guide our attempts to live a long, healthy life -- from the importance of preventive medical screenings to the concepts of wellness and mindfulness, from dietary fads to fitness culture. But Natural Causes goes deeper -- into the fundamental unreliability of our bodies and even our "mind-bodies," to use the fashionable term. Starting with the mysterious and seldom-acknowledged tendency of our own immune cells to promote deadly cancers, Ehrenreich looks into the cellular basis of aging, and shows how little control we actually have over it. We tend to believe we have agency over our bodies, our minds, and even over the manner of our deaths. But the latest science shows that the microscopic subunits of our bodies make their own "decisions," and not always in our favor. We may buy expensive anti-aging products or cosmetic surgery, get preventive screenings and eat more kale, or throw ourselves into meditation and spirituality. But all these things offer only the illusion of control. How to live well, even joyously, while accepting our mortality -- that is the vitally important philosophical challenge of this book. Drawing on varied sources, from personal experience and sociological trends to pop culture and current scientific literature, Natural Causes examines the ways in which we obsess over death, our bodies, and our health. Both funny and caustic, Ehrenreich then tackles the seemingly unsolvable problem of how we might better prepare ourselves for the end -- while still reveling in the lives that remain to us.

Author : Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher : Twelve
Page : 227 pages
File Size : 46,94 MB
Release : 2014-04-08
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1455501751

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From the New York Times bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed comes a brave, frank, and exquisitely written memoir that will change the way you see the world. Barbara Ehrenreich is one of the most important thinkers of our time. Educated as a scientist, she is an author, journalist, activist, and advocate for social justice. In Living With a Wild God, she recounts her quest-beginning in childhood-to find ""the Truth"" about the universe and everything else: What's really going on? Why are we here? In middle age, she rediscovered the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence, which records an event so strange, so cataclysmic, that she had never, in all the intervening years, written or spoken about it to anyone. It was the kind of event that people call a ""mystical experience""-and, to a steadfast atheist and rationalist, nothing less than shattering. In Living With a Wild God, Ehrenreich reconstructs her childhood mission, bringing an older woman's wry and erudite perspective to a young girl's impassioned obsession with the questions that, at one point or another, torment us all. The result is both deeply personal and cosmically sweeping-a searing memoir and a profound reflection on science, religion, and the human condition. With her signature combination of intellectual rigor and uninhibited imagination, Ehrenreich offers a true literary achievement-a work that has the power not only to entertain but amaze.

Author : Ben Ehrenreich
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 450 pages
File Size : 18,19 MB
Release : 2016
Category : Arab-Israeli conflict
ISBN : 1594205906

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In West Bank cities and small villages alike, men and women, young and old--a group of unforgettable characters--share their lives with Ehrenreich and make their own case for resistance and resilience in the face of life under occupation. Ruled by the Israeli military, set upon and harassed constantly by Israeli settlers who admit unapologetically to wanting to drive them from the land, forced to negotiate an ever more elaborate and more suffocating series of fences, checkpoints and barriers that have sundered home from field, home from home, they are a population whose living conditions are unique, and indeed hard to imagine.

Author : Denise Swanson
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 35,3 MB
Release : 2012-03-06
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1101576952

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Dev Sinclair is the happy new owner of the old-fashioned shop in her small Missouri town. But if she doesn't focus on finding the killer of her ex's fiancée, this five-and-dime owner may find herself serving twenty-five to life...

Author : Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher : Metropolitan Books
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 25,37 MB
Release : 2006-07-25
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1429915706

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The bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed goes back undercover to do for America's ailing middle class what she did for the working poor Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed explored the lives of low-wage workers. Now, in Bait and Switch, she enters another hidden realm of the economy: the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed. Armed with a plausible résumé of a professional "in transition," she attempts to land a middle-class job—undergoing career coaching and personality testing, then trawling a series of EST-like boot camps, job fairs, networking events, and evangelical job-search ministries. She gets an image makeover, works to project a winning attitude, yet is proselytized, scammed, lectured, and—again and again—rejected. Bait and Switch highlights the people who've done everything right—gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive résumés—yet have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster, and not simply due to the vagaries of the business cycle. Today's ultra-lean corporations take pride in shedding their "surplus" employees—plunging them, for months or years at a stretch, into the twilight zone of white-collar unemployment, where job searching becomes a full-time job in itself. As Ehrenreich discovers, there are few social supports for these newly disposable workers—and little security even for those who have jobs. Like the now classic Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch is alternately hilarious and tragic, a searing exposé of economic cruelty where we least expect it.

Author : Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher : Twelve
Page : 293 pages
File Size : 42,24 MB
Release : 2020-01-07
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1455543713

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A New York Times Notable BookAn ALA Notable Book "Original and illuminating." --The Washington Post What draws our species to war? What makes us see violence as a kind of sacred duty, or a ritual that boys must undergo to "become" men? Newly reissued in paperback, Blood Rites takes readers on an original journey from the elaborate human sacrifices of the ancient world to the carnage and holocaust of twentieth-century "total war." Ehrenreich sifts deftly through the fragile records of prehistory and discovers the wellspring of war in an unexpected place -- not in a "killer instinct" unique to the males of our species, but in the blood rites early humans performed to reenact their terrifying experiences of predation by stronger carnivores. Brilliant in conception and rich in scope, Blood Rites is a monumental work that continues to transform our understanding of the greatest single threat to human life.

Author : Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher : Granta Books
Page : pages
File Size : 16,35 MB
Release : 2021-01-07
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 1783786906

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A self-proclaimed 'myth buster by trade', over her long-ranging career as a journalist and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich has delved with devastating wit and insight into the social and political fabric of America. Had I Known gathers together Ehrenreich's most significant articles and excerpts from the last four decades - some of which became the starting point for her bestselling books - from her award-winning article 'Welcome to Cancerland', published shortly after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, to her groundbreaking investigative journalism in 'Nickel and Dimed', which explored living in America on the minimum wage. Issues she identified as far back as the 80s and 90s such as work poverty, rising inequality, the gender divide and medicalised health care, are top of the social and political agenda today. Written with remarkable tenderness, humour and incisiveness, Ehrenreich's describes an America of struggle, inequality, racial bias and injustice. Her extraordinarily prescient and relevant perspective announces her as one of most significant thinkers of our day.

Author : Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher : Metropolitan Books
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 18,93 MB
Release : 2007-12-26
Category : History
ISBN : 1429904658

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From the bestselling social commentator and cultural historian comes Barbara Ehrenreich's fascinating exploration of one of humanity's oldest traditions: the celebration of communal joy In the acclaimed Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich delved into the origins of our species' attraction to war. Here, she explores the opposite impulse, one that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the desire for collective joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing. Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. Although sixteenth-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and "savage," Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks' worship of Dionysus to the medieval practice of Christianity as a "danced religion." Ultimately, church officials drove the festivities into the streets, the prelude to widespread reformation: Protestants criminalized carnival, Wahhabist Muslims battled ecstatic Sufism, European colonizers wiped out native dance rites. The elites' fear that such gatherings would undermine social hierarchies was justified: the festive tradition inspired French revolutionary crowds and uprisings from the Caribbean to the American plains. Yet outbreaks of group revelry persist, as Ehrenreich shows, pointing to the 1960s rock-and-roll rebellion and the more recent "carnivalization" of sports. Original, exhilarating, and deeply optimistic, Dancing in the Streets concludes that we are innately social beings, impelled to share our joy and therefore able to envision, even create, a more peaceable future. "Fascinating . . . An admirably lucid, level-headed history of outbreaks of joy from Dionysus to the Grateful Dead."—Terry Eagleton, The Nation