Rating: 
Summary: Telling it like it really is
Review: I adore Barbara Ehrenreich, but I *know* I'm going to have to take a double dose of my anti-hypertensive medication before I delve into any of her books.She makes me angry. She makes me *rightfully* angry. I've long served the people she so compassionately depicts in *Nickled and Dimed* - the "Working Poor". These are the folks who work their butts off at minimum wage jobs with no benefits. Forget Health Insurance and a Retirement Plan; workers earning minimum wage are blessed if they can afford to eat AND live indoors. The sad thing is that Ehrenreich HAD to do this to call attention to the folks who clean our houses, serve our food, and smile cheerfully at us in Discount stores. I challenge my fellow Americans DO THE MATH! Check out the want ads in your local paper; compare the rent of the cheapest apartment to the monthly wage offered to unskilled workers. Could you live on the difference? Even better could you raise a family on that? Barbara, you GO, girlfriend!
Rating:
Summary: Exceptional
Review: This book opened my eyes (even though I think they are usually quite wide open). As every good book should, this book has changed the way that I see the world. Even though when I was a student, I worked some of those minimum wage jobs, this book shows the bleak lives and expectations of those people that are trapped for life in those jobs. The writing is passionate, compassionate and funny. It manages to get its points across strongly without ever becoming preachy.
Rating:
Summary: highly recommended
Review: i haven't read this yet but i'm going to . bill maher highly recommended this on larry king tonite so that's good enough for me. sounds like a good one though
Rating:
Summary: Practical Sociology
Review: For those looking for a book with numbers, graphs, and complex policy, this is not the book for you. Nickel and Dimed opened my eyes to an entire section of American society that is forgotten and ignored. Ehrenreich's accounts shocked and horrified me. This book will burst the bubble of any American under the illusion that the '90s made Americans rich. These stories of hardship also put my own life into perspective. While Nickel and Dimes provides no easy solutions to the problem of poverty, it at least shows why something must be done. Allowing people to suffer in the richest nation the world has ever seen is a crime.
Rating: 
Summary: a sobering, embittered account...
Review: this book will vindicate the socialist in you. ;o) in barbara ehrenreich's experiences as a minimum-wage-earner, you get a sense of the hopelessness and degradation that fill the lives of the working poor. her writing is entertaining but thoughtful, reflecting the dead-end work opportunities open to the uneducated and the 'unskilled.' it made me mad, reading about the disregard for human well-being the author encountered during her research. i suppose you can see it yourself ever day, if you bother to look close enough.
Rating:
Summary: Renewed Appreciation
Review: After reading this book, I have a new appreciation of the blessing of a stable address, food in the refrigerator, and the ability to close a door and enter a space that allows privacy without fear of interruption. Ms. Ehrenreich has made it impossible to ever walk into a mega-mart store again and see the employees as faceless servants or to dismiss them as under achievers. Although her political sentiments sometimes lead to some naive and biased conclusions, this is a work that changed my perceptions and for that I thank her.
Rating:
Summary: Eye opener!
Review: This book is very easy to read and it so eye opening! I have worked in many restaurant jobs and daycare situations in high school and college. I never thought about having to think about rent and food, etc. on those wages. Barbara admits that her situations were forced but really brings light to the fact that it is ridiculous for us to keep preaching the "American Dream" to people that can barely make it to each meal, rent, paycheck. Excellent Book!
Rating: 
Summary: On Assignment from Karl Marx - Baba Ehrenreich!
Review: Dr. Baba Ehrenreich has fully complied with the requirements for graduation into the Karl Marx socialist pantheon with her latest potemkinic tome. Sure, women who perform HARD, menial work for their entire lives while living ALWAYS on their own will NOT make it! That's why those among them with ANY initiative will start their OWN fledgling cleaning services, lunch stops, making and selling crafts, etc., employing (exploiting?) the youngest and strongest available to do the same sorts of repetitive things they used to. THAT'S initiative, and that's also VERY common these days. I myself used to do repetitive gift-wrapping for minimum wage, and once tried to supplement it with minimum wage repetitive factory work. This was too much for MY hands, as well! So, I did lots of other things, including craft-making for local boutiques. There ARE choices BESIDES intentionally degenerating into arthritic petrification! Creating households with multiple members that support one another in tough times is the most obvious - and that often means one person working two jobs while another is temporarily out of any work. Big Deal! Contrast this with the dope-smoking author, who insisted on living alone, "being on her own". That sounds like what a pregnant 14-year old would say! If her own attitudes were actually representative of the social skills of the women she emulated, they wouldn't be STRUGGLING in difficulty, yet full of life...rather, they would have long ago perished of self-abuse and spiritual starvation.
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Summary: it is all so painfully true
Review: barbara e is to be championed for her daring to reveal the soft underbelly of the american economic prosperity. there will be a day of reckoning. the wages that the corporations are stealing from the people who do the real labor so that the bankers, lawyers and investors can make a profit will reap an interest that will be painful to enjoy. when inhuman corporations have more 'value' to the government than the people there is something terribly wrong. read this book. tell everyone you know about it....
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Summary: The US version of Down and Out in Paris and London
Review: If you have read, and liked, George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London then this is a book for you. The author writes engagingly and informatively on what it is like to part of America's "working poor" and, in the process, punctures a number of middle-class prescriptions for, and misconceptions about, the poor. Why do the poor eat junk food? Because they don't have the facilities - kitchen, pots, cooker - to make lentil soup. Why do the poor live in hotel rooms paying $60 per night? Because they don't have the money for the deposit on the rent of an apartment. Housing always emerges as the single biggest obstacle in the lives of low-paid employees. Did you know that many low-paid employees ($6-$7 per hour) live in their cars and vans? That a perk of a waitress' job with a hotel was permission to park her van-cum-home in the hotel car park? This book is in the best tradition of writing with a social conscience -it does not beatify the poor, nor does it regard them as unter-menschen. Indeed, the messsage that I, surrounded by my bourgeois comforts, took away was: "There but for the grace of God.." If you are not averse to this genre, then you should read this book - it is among the best of this type of writing.
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