Godina izdanja: Ostalo
ISBN: Ostalo
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

U dobrom stanju


Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America is a book written by Barbara Ehrenreich. Written from her perspective as an undercover journalist, it sets out to investigate the impact of the 1996 welfare reform act on the working poor in the United States.

The events related in the book took place between spring 1998 and summer 2000. The book was first published in 2001 by Metropolitan Books. It was expanded from an article she wrote from a January 1999 issue of Harper`s Magazine. Ehrenreich later wrote a companion book, Bait and Switch (published September 2005), about her attempt to find a white-collar job.

In 2019, the book was ranked 13th on The Guardian`s list of the 100 best books of the 21st century.[1] In 2024, it was ranked 57th on the New York Times list of the 100 best books of the 21st century.

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In this now classic work, Barbara Ehrenreich, our sharpest and most original social critic, goes `undercover` as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of American prosperity.

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―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 int 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. You will never see anything―from a motel bathroom to a restaurant meal―in quite the same way again.