Rating: 
Summary: Ehrenreich mocks the overprivileged
Review: Ehrenreich mocks the overprivileged with a realistic perspective. The five stars go for the whole book.It's personal, well-written, and even entertaining and humorous, giving an articulate voice to people who don't normally have the writing skills. Anyone who's not brainwashed into hatred of the lower classes by the ideologues on Fox News or Hate Radio will enjoy this book.
Rating: 
Summary: This would have been a really interesting magazine article..
Review: There were big chunks of this book that were definitely worth reading, but overall it feels like at least a hundred pages of fluff and "I'm a middle-aged pothead" ramblings are used to stitch the thing together. This would be a very compelling read if it were cut down to 40 pages or less. Once you get past the wasted pages, you'll find some great nuggets that will get you thinking. The one that sticks with me the most is the insight on why/how the very poor end up in $40/night hotels. Also, the few peeks into why some women have little or no options when it comes to escaping an abusive relationship was fascinating.
Rating: 
Summary: the real deal
Review: Enrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed" is an eyeopening book. She pries open doors that some never see, and exposes how things really happen in the working world. "Nickel and Dimed" presents a fresh and raw look at the lower level jobs, illustrates what it is like to be in such a situation...the struggles, the aspirations. Overall, this is an enlightening book, and gave me a richer feel for the working world, and opened my eyes and mind to what others deal with throughout a lifetime.
Rating:
Summary: nickel
Review: Nickel and Dimed
Barbara Enrenreich
By : Alexandria Kebede. Barbra had a Ph.D. She had a nice house, and a stable home. Looking out on everything she took for granted was going to be a little more difficult then what she had planned. Nickel and dime is a novel illustrating the hardships and tragedies of a low-income jobs. When you order a Seizer Salad with your friends, you might never think to look into the life of the waiter or waitress delivering the lettuce. Barbra did this, will that would be an understatement Barbra lived this.
She dropped everything she had down to every dime, and started a life as a poor citizen. Starting on a wanted aid in the newspaper seems pretty easy at a first glance. As an observer you would think that Barbra had this all planned out. She would work; make seven or six dollars an hour. Pay for an apartment and spend her long hours observing the natural life of a waitress. Barbra found herself soon in a rat race. Trying to battle food and bills at the same time.
Actually bills is not correct. She couldn't afford bills, so she stayed in a motel. This as you'll learn in the book is actually a luxury for her associates. Some people that she spoke of couldn't even afford to live in a motel. They had to live in the back of the building they worked in, or share a motel with three other associates. Barbra luckily could afford to stay in her own motel (more worse off than motel six) and have at least one meal a night.
Meals, that would probably be the hardest thing to deal with. Could you imagine living days were your dinner consists of a heated burrito from 7/11. She says that looking out on her former grocery store was torture; something should toke for granite was a luxury she would have never imagined.
There were a lot of astonishing facts in the book as well. For example, did you know that thirty percent of the homeless are actually juggling jobs. And that bathroom breaks are actually a bonus. And which really surprised me personally is that waiter's tips get deducted from the hourly pay. On top of that the waiters (which is a law if you want to make it through the day smooth and easy) split their tips with the cooks, because if they don't the cooks will make life harder for the waitress. Working in a restraints is a cycle of people that all have to work together to make sure the place gets ran correctly. But the mangers don't understand that, and they treat their employees like garbage. Hounding them on their five minute breaks. Not even giving them simple sit down time when there isn't anyone one in the restraint.
Working in a restraint was hard for Barbra she said it was one of that hardest things she's done. Until taking orders and keeping tabs on tables turned into a mechanical action. Were everything she did wasn't thought out it skipped her trail of thought and turned into an instinct. She was hollow minded half of the time working like a robot. Kind of like the people at the airports who type like drill sergeants.
Barbra couldn't take it anymore and she simply walked out on the job. Right in the middle of someone's order. She had too much going on, and so many people calling her name that she threw down her pad and walked out. Her next job was not as hectic but it was laborious.
She worked as a house cleaner. The one thing that I took with me in this chapter was her friends story. She was running to the van with a bucket so they could make it to the next house they had to clean when she fell and cried out in excruciating pain. Barbra told her she had to go to the doctors but she refused. When she refused I didn't know why I thought she would have gone to the doctors right off the bat. She didn't because the manager wouldn't pay her for the rest of the day and her husband would probably beat her. This cycle she fell into was hard to get out of. How can you hope for a better job when you can't even get family support. If she quit her job and her husband how is she going to eat. And even worse she would have to give up her children.
When I use to look at Oprah or Ricki Lake, and see women cry about the way their husbands beat them I would change the channel in disgust. I didn't like to see the ignorance of women who were weak enough to sit in a house and take the violence. Now that I understand why its so difficult to get out of a job when your stuck in it I have more respect for waiters cleaner and cashers. The worse part about this book is having it come to an end and know that nothing has truly changed.
Rating: 
Summary: Please forgive her...
Review: Ehrenreich mocks the underprivileged with her unrealistic perspective. The two stars go to the last chapter.
Rating:
Summary: Walking The "Walk"
Review: I respectfully but strongly disagree with those reviewers who imply that the author was some cynical opportunist for writing this book --- riding on the back of the poor, as it were, and then milking the lecture circuit thereafter.
Given her resume, I think Ehrenreich was pretty well-off to begin with, and presumably would have continued to be so with or without writing this book. I really, really doubt that she wrote the book so she could buy a(nother) condo in Aspen. If you read the book without attributing some imaginary callous cynicism on the part of the author's so-called "motive," I think you will see that Ehrenreich is genuinely concerned about the future of the people who are simply NOT getting by no matter how hard they work. This book, short and punchy, gives one accurate-enough a picture of what it is like to be too over-worked to stop and figure out how to fend for oneself. Must one necessarily fall into an open manhole, break a bone, and permanently wallow in the sewage in order to to claim the right to speak on behalf of those who did fall in and are still trapped down there?
Really, to demand the author's head on a platter for taking breaks between assignments or using her credit card to stay afloat is just too much bile and venom. As far as I am concerned, the author walked the walk and shed light enough on the subject for me to do things differently from now on. And that's enough for me to praise this book.
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Summary: Read the book , not the Author
Review: Ehrenreich placed herself in the maw of desperation, stared into the throat of the beast, took in a lungful of the mephitic halitosis of the injustice, and came back with this searing narrative to wake this one reader UP. I think Ehrenreich is genuinely concerned about the future of the people who are getting crushed daily under the wheel of inequity in the land of plenty. But the book is not about being "up close and personal" with the people she encounters along the way but not because the people are not important but because that sort of info is NOT relevant to the story she wants to tell.
Her aim in this book is to show what ANYBODY (you and me but for the...) would have to go through IF placed in the sort of circumstances in which the people she is writing about find themselves. Ehrenreich's writing style? It's loose, fast, off the cuff, not to say slangy. She uses certain words that are probably not really part of most people's vocabulary, and as far as I can see, that really is about the only way she indulges herself in this book. The book comes off feeling like a letter that an educated person would write to her (educated) friends.
But then, is it not the members of the so-called "educated class" with with their massive expendable income and social influence who need to see the picture that Ehrenreich is presenting here and maybe rethink about how it is that they are sustained in all their comforts and privileges? Subjectivity in the form of anger and compasssion pervades the writing throughout. But it is also, by turns, witty, sassy, cheeky, humorous (no, HILARIOUS), tough, and, yes, even sarcastic when called for --- about the creepy Orwellian Double-Speak and euphemisms that corporations (such as Walmart)use (much like the military) to lull their employees into abject submission by referring to them as "associates" and tooting slogans like "respect the individual." Ehrenreich did not choose to live permanently among the working poor (would you?), and she mentions a few times that she has a Phd. But she is not bragging. The author tries to contextualize what she sees as the mental divide between the haves and the have-nots, and how it operates, even without any malice on the part of those who are well-off. For example, she mentions that her daughter, ROSA, is attending Harvard. Sounds snooty? Guess again: Rosa goes to the home of a wealthy classmate whose father cavalierly assumes that Ehrenreich must have named her daughter after her favorite MAID. She did not.
The author states as a matter of fact (like her having a PhD) that she does her own cleaning. She clearly states that she has always found the idea of hiring people to do one's own cleaning morally reprehensible. Ehrenreich's mention of her own PhD and her daughter going to Harvard apparently annoys some people to the point where they cannot hear the rest of the story or skew it ----which is that those at the highest income brackets are (still) amazingly insensitive, not to say inhumane.
Ehrenreich's musing about the stressed-out rich spending thousands of dollars at some Buddhist retreat (maybe) to learn about compassion and humility -- while maids clean their houses during their absence -- was funny in a totally unfunny way. She walked the walk -- the walk nobody with an income big enough to own a pc with an internet hookup to read this review would ever voluntarily take. I, for one, am deeply indebted to Barbara for her honest account of what she witnessed among those we see everyday without seeing -- as the struggling poor for the most part do their dignified darndest to NOT stand out. The book has caused me think about my life and the true meaning of compassion more graphically than all the Dalai Lama books put together. Any book that can change one's complacent view about the world is gold. For me, this book was platinum.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Idea - Poorly written and executed
Review: Great idea for a book. Poor execution and shabby insights by the author. The only insight is that cleaning services are not so clean. I guess this insight pays for the book, but otherwise a waste of time....and frustrating read.
Try it yourself, but don't buy it..it's a waste of money.
Donate the several dollars to charity...a much better investment in humanity.
Rating:
Summary: Nickels & Dimes Are Better Than Silence
Review: Nickel and Dimed, whatever its shortcomings, is still a book, ideally, everyone should read. It would make excellent course reading, anywhere from high school to college. There is simply too little discussion of poverty in this country to pass up any opportunity at all to learn something about it. What makes Nickel and Dimed so readable is that it just is: apart from the voyeuristic aspect of following Ehrenreich on her bumbling course through the majority's everyday life, there is also her prose style, which, even given her background, is still surprisingly narrative and descriptive, often witty and funny. Although initially troubled by a lack of insight into the experiences she narrates, I was ultimately convinced that the structure she chose-three narrative sections on each of the minimum-wage jobs she holds and a final analytical section on the whole experience-serves her well. It makes the three narrative sections almost novelistic, and allows the reader to draw her or his own conclusions about what she experiences. Apart from the extreme readability of the book (for nonfiction) and the obvious compelling nature of the subject matter, however, praise should be distributed carefully. Reading as someone who grew up belonging to the class of workers Ehrenreich treats with the usual ethnographic detachment (sometimes, yes, condescension), I often found myself angry at her for missing this or assuming that. Nevertheless, in criticizing her efforts I think it's important to remember to account for the difficulty of the subject. Precisely because there is such a dearth of information on poverty (and because of the concomitant anger this silence breeds), there is a strong tendency to blame Ehrenreich for not saying everything that needs to be said about the poor. Although she could have done more to indicate that her work is just a beginning, one can't really blame her for setting parameters to her project. Apparently, her main concern, although her project could have addressed many others, is to dispel the myth that those who are poor and/or on welfare aren't working full time to try to support themselves, and the related myth that the homeless are also always unemployed. She also seems intent on testing welfare reform and attacking economists for the arbitrary and outdated ways in which they measure poverty. Along the way, she also manages to uncover what seems like the most desperate truth of the book, the overwhelming affordable housing shortage. Don't these seem like enough goals for one short book? Inevitably, such a project-essentially one of posing, passing, or otherwise slumming-is riddled with difficulties. For me, one of the most frustrating aspects of the book is the Key West section, or really what happens after it. Working alongside of Haitians, African Americans, and a multitude of other ethnic and racial minorities common to Key West, Ehrenreich is stingy with her analysis of this essential component of the working poor in America. True, how could she, as a white, American woman, possibly have explored life as a low-wage worker and a minority. But certainly fleeing from the multiculturalism of Key West to the oppressive whiteness of Maine in an effort to avoid the question of race and ethnicity altogether cannot possibly be the best or only answer to this conundrum. Attempting to address poverty while sidestepping race and ethnicity in this country is like trying to write a history of Germany without the Jews. Furthermore, the way the project gets dreamed up-a spur of the moment conversation-can hardly account for the little planning that seems to have gone into the endeavor. Perhaps Ehrenreich's goal was to enter the experiment with as much of a blank slate as possible, some skewed notion of objectivity. But she sabotages her project my allowing herself a multitude of start-up perks that the average low-wage worker wouldn't have access to, like start-up money and an emergency fund (not to mention a car!). On the other hand, Ehrenreich is open about her shortcomings, admitting, for example, the stupidity of spending $30 on a pair of slacks while earning only $7 an hour. Her decision, based on the middle-class assumption that these pants would last better than cheaper ones, is ridiculous to the point of being endearing. These utter lapses of perceptive judgment on someone whose career is social commentary are also illuminating, helpful in realizing how utterly alien the poor mindset can be to someone who is outside it. If you'll allow me a third hand, however, the lapses are also surprising because of the very same reason. If you're looking for insight, Ehrenreich has none. She seems confused and upset about her experience, and unable to make much sense of it. The failure of what is nationally recognized as a perceptive mind to fathom the depths of poverty-and what that means for us as a classed society-is all the insight you'll get. There are other shortcomings too, no doubt also related to Ehrenreich's barely contained horror at what her flippant little project amounted to. For example, although she reveals her identity to some of her coworkers after the experiment is over, she never, apparently, discusses her experience with them. This is a gross flaw, seeing that it perpetuates discourse about the poor from "experts" without asking the poor themselves about their lives. Such a wasted opportunity! What were their educational experiences? Why have they been limited to low-wage work? What are their dreams? How would they improve their lives? You won't hear it from them. Despite all these frustrations, the book is, to reiterate, both readable and important. If anything, it is a marvelous discussion-starter. On a personal level, it can make you question your economic status. What does it depend on? Who didn't get a two-dollar raise, who's living in her van and working over forty hours a week, so that you could get your DVD player so cheap? Like it or hate it, this book will make you think.
Rating:
Summary: Very disappointing
Review: Nickel and Dimed was a big disappointment. The shame of this book is that the idea had so much potential for an interesting, informative and moving book. I wanted to like it, but Ehrenreich disappointed me, almost from the first chapter. What I had hoped for was a first-hand, unbiased view of what it is like to live today as an unskilled American worker. Unfortunately, Ehrenreich appeared to have an agenda from the outset. To be completely honest, I too had an agenda when I bought the book. I expected to gain further support for my view that the American workplace today is a difficult place, unlivable for all but the most priviliged. So what's my beef with Ehrenreich's book, since that seems to be its theme? Firstly, there is a an almost complete lack of factual support for the majority of the author's conclusions. The lines between her opinions and actual facts are blurry at best. Second, Ehrenreich consistently bemoans employees' problems in the workplace while belittling employers' challenges. In the real world, it's acknowledged that when an employee takes a job, she is "selling her time and skills" to an employer. In contrast, Ehrenreich spends large sections of her book going on about how ridiculous it is that her employers had opposed her doing personal errands at work, or standing around and chatting with co-workers. She pokes fun at these employers for calling her behavior "stealing time". In my experience, most employees acknowledge that it is cheating their employer if they are being paid to work, and they instead sneak out to do something personal, or hide from the boss to chat with co-workers. By failing to acknowledge even the most valid of her employers' complaints, Ehrenreich loses credibility with the audience. Done right, this project could have resulted in a book that changed the workplace for low wage workers. It could have opened the eyes of business decision makers to the plight of their most vulnerable workers, and perhaps have started a dialog for change. Instead, Ehrenreich sold out. She disappointed me, and she let down the people whose stories and lives she used to sell books. What a shame.
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