Ehrenreich, Barbara

Nickel and dimed : on (not) getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich ( Book )
61 editions published between 2001 and 2011 in 10 languages and held by 5,068 libraries worldwide
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 -- could be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on six to seven dollars an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered as a woefully inexperienced homemaker returning to the workforce. So began a grueling, hair raising, and darkly funny odyssey through the underside of working America. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, Ehrenreich worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. 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.

Bait and switch : the (futile) pursuit of the American dream by Barbara Ehrenreich ( Book )
16 editions published between 2005 and 2009 in English and Chinese and held by 2,797 libraries worldwide
Ehrenreich enters the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed. Armed with a plausible résumé of a professional "in transition," she attempts to land a job--undergoing career coaching and personality testing, then 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. This book highlights the people who've done everything right, yet have become vulnerable to financial disaster, and not simply due to the vagaries of the business cycle. Today's ultra-lean corporations take pride in shedding "surplus" employees--plunging them into the twilight zone of white-collar unemployment. As Ehrenreich discovers, there are few social supports for these newly disposable workers--and little security even for those who have jobs. --From publisher description.

Bright-sided : how the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich ( Book )
23 editions published between 2009 and 2011 in 4 languages and held by 2,271 libraries worldwide
A sharp-witted knockdown of America's love affair with positive thinking and an urgent call for a new commitment to realism, existential clarity and courage.

Dancing in the streets : a history of collective joy by Barbara Ehrenreich ( Book )
20 editions published between 2006 and 2009 in English and Turkish and held by 1,663 libraries worldwide
"Cultural historian Ehrenreich explores a human impulse 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. She uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. Although 16th-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and "savage," Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks to medieval Christianity. Ultimately, church officials drove the festivities into the streets, 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 uprisings and revolutions from France to 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.--From publisher description."--Source other than the Library of Congress.

Global woman : nannies, maids, and sex workers in the new economy ( Book )
15 editions published between 2002 and 2004 in English and held by 1,651 libraries worldwide
In a remarkable pairing, two renowned social critics offer a groundbreaking anthology that examines the unexplored consequences of globalization on the lives of women worldwide. Women are moving around the globe as never before. But for every female executive racking up frequent flier miles, there are multitudes of women whose journeys go unnoticed. Each year, millions leave Mexico, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and other third world countries to work in the homes, nurseries, and brothels of the first world. This broad-scale transfer of labor associated with women's traditional roles results in an odd displacement. In the new global calculus, the female energy that flows to wealthy countries is subtracted from poor ones, often to the detriment of the families left behind. The migrant nanny--or cleaning woman, nursing care attendant, maid--eases a "care deficit" in rich countries, while her absence creates a "care deficit" back home. Confronting a range of topics, from the fate of Vietnamese mail-order brides to the importation of Mexican nannies in Los Angeles and the selling of Thai girls to Japanese brothels, "Global woman offers an unprecedented look at a world shaped by mass migration and economic exchange on an ever-increasing scale. In fifteen vivid essays--of which only four have been previously published--by a diverse and distinguished group of writers, collected and introduced by best selling authors Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, this anthology reveals a new era in which the main resource extracted from the third world is no longer gold or silver, but love.

For her own good : 150 years of the experts' advice to women by Barbara Ehrenreich ( Book )
23 editions published between 1978 and 1989 in English and held by 1,647 libraries worldwide

Fear of falling : the inner life of the middle class by Barbara Ehrenreich ( Book )
15 editions published between 1989 and 1990 in English and held by 1,641 libraries worldwide
An analysis of the professional middle class from the liberal elite of the 1960s to the yuppies of the 1980s and the amount of power and influence they wield over the American culture.

This land is their land : reports from a divided nation by Barbara Ehrenreich ( Book )
9 editions published between 2008 and 2009 in English and held by 1,633 libraries worldwide
The author's second work of satirical commentary reflects on one of the cruelest decades in memory, the 2000's, in which she finds a nation scarred by deepening inequality, corroded by distrust, and shamed by its official cruelty. Her first book of satirical commentary, The Worst Years of Our Lives, was about the Reagan era. 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 book she subjects them to biting and incisive satire. Taking the measure of what we are left with after the cruelest decade in memory, she 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. Her anecdotes 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 rage against those who have given us a nation scarred by deepening inequality, corroded by distrust, and shamed by its official cruelty.

The worst years of our lives : irreverent notes from a decade of greed by Barbara Ehrenreich ( Book )
10 editions published between 1990 and 1991 in English and held by 1,534 libraries worldwide
Ehrenreich here reprints a selection of her elegantly satirical essays that were originally published in Ms., Mother Jones and other journals during the Reagan years, articles in which she skewers political figures and others for causing a decay in human values. A strong sense of the ridiculous informs Ehrenreich's attack on those she judges guilty: phony evangelists, moneyed polluters and developers, Wall Street bandits, officials heedless of the poor. There are pieces on Nancy Reagan's memoir My Turn and on Oliver North as warrior prince of the secret government. The book has its critics, but Ehrenreich could also promote healthy rebellions in her role as someone who doesn't suffer fools at all, let alone grudgingly.--adapted from Publishers Weekly.

Blood rites : origins and history of the passions of war by Barbara Ehrenreich ( Book )
19 editions published between 1997 and 2011 in English and Italian and held by 1,529 libraries worldwide
"In Blood Rites, renowned social critic Barbara Ehrenreich confronts a subject that has challenged thinkers from Homer to Freud: What draws our species to war and even makes us see it as a kind of sacred undertaking? Ehrenreich takes us on an original journey from the grasslands of prehistoric Africa to the trenches of Verdun, from the spectacular human sacrifices of precolonial Central America to the carnage and holocaust of twentieth-century "total war."" "Sifting through the fragile records of prehistory, Ehrenreich discovers the wellspring of war in an unexpected place - not in a "killer instinct" unique to the males of our species, nor in our Paleolithic hunting tradition, but in the blood rites early humans performed to reenact their terrifying experience of predation by stronger carnivores. It is in these ancient blood rites that Ehrenreich finds the first form of organized, socially sanctioned violence - and the spiritual antecedent of war." "Moving into historical time, Ehrenreich traces the evolution of war from the sacred undertaking of a privileged warrior caste to the central rite of the mass religion we know today as nationalism and shows the persistence of ancient fears in the most modern rituals and passions of war."--BOOK JACKET.