"A selection of the most provocative, incendiary, and brilliant pieces from one of America's most significant left-leaning journalists and activists.
'One of our great iconoclasts, lucid, thought-provoking and instructive'
- the Guardian
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."
"Barbara Ehrenreich's first book of satirical commentary, The Worst Years of Our Lives, which was about the Reagan era, was received with bestselling acclaim. The one problem was the title: couldn't some prophetic fact-checker have seen that the worst years of our lives—far worse—were still to come? Here they are, the 2000s, and in This Land Is Their Land, Ehrenreich subjects them to the most biting and incisive satire of her career.
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."
"From bestselling social commentator and cultural historian Barbara Ehrenreich comes this fascinating exploration of one of humanity's oldest traditions: the celebration of communal joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing. Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture, showing that such mass festivities have been indigenous to the West since the ancient Greeks. Though suppressed by elites who fear the undermining of social hierarchies, outbreaks of group revelry still persist, 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 shows that we are innately social beings, impelled to share our joy and thereby envision a peaceable future."
"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 world of the white-collar unemployed. Armed with a plausible resume of a professional 'in transition,' attempts to land a 'middle class job' undergoing career coaching and personality testing, then begins trawling a series of EST-like 'boot camps,' job fairs, 'networking events,' and evangelical job-search 'ministries.' She gets an 'image makeover' to prepare her for the corporate world and works hard to project the 'winning attitude' recommended for a successful job search. She 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 resumes—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 the new 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 expose of economic cruelty where we least expect it."
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