Nickel and Dimed

Books | Social Science / Poverty & Homelessness

3.9

(277)

Barbara Ehrenreich

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 EvictedMillions 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 intend 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.

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More Details:

Author

Barbara Ehrenreich

Pages

224

Publisher

Henry Holt and Company

Published Date

2010-04-01

ISBN

1429926643 9781429926645

Ratings

Google: 3

Community ReviewsSee all

"I’ve wanted to read this book for a while as it’s especially important today. The author, Barbara, leaves her “real life” to go work 3 very low paying jobs as an investigative reporter with the goal of writing a book about how the lower class survives. It’s always profound when you read a book like this, written almost 20 years ago, and see now that it was like a premonition. Wage gaps have exploded and prejudice of people of color and women are a continued and increasing problem."

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Sheldon Rapoza

"This book provided a very interesting look at working on minimum wage thay not mamy people consider. This book changed my outlook on things and made me a more understanding person. However, a few times the author phrased things in ways I didn’t like."

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Alyssa Czernek

"Fascinating and depressing look at the struggle of the working poor (particularly women!) in the US today."

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Rebekah Travis

"1.5<br/><br/>Though the insight into a minimum wage workers’ life was pretty interesting and good to know, the author spoke in this tone throughout the whole book that just set me on edge. I couldn’t get past many of her comments about how people weren’t surprised or didn’t care that she wasn’t one of them and was writing a book and she got offended that they showed no interest beyond “will you be on tomorrow’s shift?”. In the third part there were comments on the weight of some of the customers, showing some very fatphobic ideas, and earlier she makes many comments about disabled people that sounded very ableist. There was a comment later in the book that almost had an (unnecessarily) reassuring tone about “oh these two men are sharing a room but don’t worry they’re not gay from what I could see” and many other comments about race and some that showed a little bit of missing education in certain areas (one comment about how it’s sad how abortion was “wasted on the unborn” when she dealt with an especially annoying child, so there seemed to be a misunderstanding about the term “abortion”). <br/>Overall I was just annoyed the whole time and this took me forever to get through because I didn’t want to deal with this (and because it was summer reading for school but that’s besides the point). The insight we got from her was somewhat interesting but I couldn’t help thinking she could’ve gotten a more realistic story if she’d just interviewed actual minimum wage workers instead of doing this whole “undercover” thing where we saw it all from her point of view. I mean there was literally a part where she said she wasn’t going to use the bus and would stick to her car because “no one wanted to read about waiting for the bus”… come on."

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Erin 💫

"Great book. Really makes you think"

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Susan Clark

"Quick relatable read. Really speaks about the struggles of the working poor."

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Abby Mier

"It was a real look into American poverty. Well written in a snarky way. Great read!"

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Patrick Mignanelli