|
This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation
|
| Price: |
88 new or used available from $1.65
Average customer review:
Product Description
America in the ’aughts—hilariously skewered, brilliantly dissected, and darkly diagnosed by the bestselling social critic hailed as “the soul mate”* of Jonathan Swift
Barbara Ehrenreich’s first book of satirical commentary, The Worst Years of Our Lives, about the Reagan era, was received with bestselling acclaim. 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 Land Is Their Land, Ehrenreich subjects them to the most biting and incisive satire of her career.
Taking the measure of what we are left with after the cruelest decade in memory, Ehrenreich 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. Ehrenreich’s antidotes 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 boundless rage against those who have given us a nation scarred by deepening inequality, corroded by distrust, and shamed by its official cruelty.
Full of wit and generosity, these reports from a divided nation show once again that Ehrenreich is, as Molly Ivins said, “good for the soul.”
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of fourteen books, including Dancing in the Streets and The New York Times bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. A frequent contributor to Harper’s and The Nation, she has also been a columnist at The New York Times and Time magazine.
In her second book of satirical commentary, Barbara Ehrenreich subjects the 'aughts to the most biting and incisive satire of her career. She points to shortfalls in the US's standards of health care, employment, education, immigration, and personal liberties. She also looks beyond those issues to the great inadequacies in the modern American standard of living.
Taking the measure of what America has left with after the cruelest decade in memory, Ehrenreich 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. Ehrenreich’s antidotes 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 boundless rage against those who have given us a nation scarred by deepening inequality, corroded by distrust, and shamed by its official cruelty.
With research and wit, Ehrenreich dissects and humanizes the social problems that plague the U.S. as a whole, even though it remains a nation divided.
"There's a reason that people scoop up Ehrenreich's books: big chunks of the excoriation are fantastically funny. She's at her best when she takes on idiocies in our culture—skewering the shelves of new business books that seem to have been written by people who don't understand any genre except Powerpoint, and lamenting that 'contrary to the rumors I have been trying to spread for some time, Disney Princess products are not contaminated with lead' . . . She can be quite insightful, noting that the photos from Abu Ghraib reveal once and for all that women are no more moral than men . . . In refreshing contrast with the many media outlets obsessed with profiling the rich and the famous, Ehrenreich uses her platform to tell stories of the down and out. She also does a service in pointing out truly stupid public policies—for instance, forcing soldiers' families to rely on food stamps."—Laura Vanderkam, City Journal
"With burning wit and righteousness, Ehrenreich critiques politicians, evangelicals, corporations (Wal-Mart, Circuit City, the Gap, Target) and the odd movie (Miami Vice) with a scorn that abates only when she's talking about her granddaughters, whom she invokes to remind MSNBC analyst Kate O'Beirne that she is far from the family-hating feminist O'Beirne makes her out to be . . . Given the wretched state of U.S. healthcare, the decline of manufacturing jobs, the looming threat to reproductive rights and the nattering mendacity that issues from the mouths of cable-news pundits, it's hard to deny Ehrenreich her outrage. Hardly any contemporary social critic is so entertaining in her darkly satirical fury, or so clear. Neither of the current presidential candidates has matched Ehrenreich in driving home the healthcare problem as she does in one short essay (written shortly after President Bush vetoed a bill expanding state health insurance coverage for children) titled 'Children Deserve Veterinary Care Too' . . . You can sense in her fulminations over self-help books and workplace bullies a progressive voice yearning to be heard by the people who need her most—the ones who don't read the Nation or Harper's or even the New York Times."—Judith Lewis, Los Angeles Times
"Ehrenreich follows the best American tradition of political satire, skewering a country that gives acupuncture to dogs while kids go without health insurance. Some of these tidbits are funny, such as one where Ehrenreich tries to figure out the secret hand signals of lesbian women hooking up in airport bathrooms. Others are moving, including a piece on college graduate burdened with debt in an era when a bachelor's degree isn't worth the paper it is printed on . . . Ehrenreich poignantly writes how the photos from Abu Ghraib 'broke my heart' with her realization that women can be as cruel as men, though I thought we had figured that out with Diane Downs . . . [Readers] will find plenty of black-laced humor and, at times, a strong jolt of passion."—Rene Denfeld, The Oregonian (Portland)
"Ehrenreich once again rides to the rescue of the dispossessed in This Land Is Theirs: Reports From a Divided Nation. Tirelessly skewering the Bush administration's 'deft upward redistribution of wealth' and a culture that applauds an 'orgy of accumulation at the top,' she almost makes me wish I were a hidebound, flint-hearted Republican, so that I could test the sharpness of her barbs. They seem well honed to me, but is that only because I so badly want them to sting?"—Adam Begley, The New York Observer
"Barbara Ehrenreich finds herself, once again, in a dreadful place where greedy, nasty little people—corporate CEOs, college administrators, media moguls, the perpetually insatiable, the Chris
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #472109 in Books
- Published on: 2008-06-24
- Released on: 2008-06-24
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 256 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780805088403
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
When a hospital employee whose hospital-supplied insurance doesn't cover her hospital-incurred bill finds her wages garnished, where's a political satirist to go for material? Feisty, fearlessly progressive Ehrenreich offers laughter on the way to tears in 62 previously published essays that show the rich getting richer and poor getting poorer. She investigates pockets of poverty among undocumented workers, military families and recent college graduates. Ehrenreich's reach is capacious, encompassing not only unemployment, health insurance and inflation, but corporate spying, cancer studies, marriage education, the abstinence training business and Disney's Princess products. Her passion, compassion and wit keep these excursions lively and timely—even when yesterday's headlines provide the immediate provocation, e.g., JetBlue's snow snafu. The vignettes go down a bit like eating peanuts—too many at one time palls, but they're not unhealthy, unless you have an allergic reaction to Ehrenreich's message: America is being polarized between the superrich few and the subrich everyone else. Entertaining Ehrenreich certainly is, but she raises a hard, serious question: How many 'wake-up calls' do we need, people...? (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Despite long national claims to being a classless society, the U.S. has a growing gulch between the haves and have-nots and what used to be the middle class. Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed (2001) and Bait and Switch (2005), catalogs the many ways that the rich are getting richer and the rest of us are getting poorer. The new top of the polarized social order has “pay in the tens of hundreds of millions, a private jet and a few acres of Nantucket,” and the new bottom is virtual slavery—captive domestics, sweatshop workers, and sex slaves exploited by their employers. She details the huge compensation gaps between CEOs and other management, top-ranked professors and adjunct professors, law firm partners and temp lawyers. In separate sections, Ehrenreich analyzes how wealthy individuals and corporations maintain the gap by engineering social, political, and economic policies that continue to disadvantage the middle class and poor, and our accommodation to it. Ehrenreich’s sharp analysis and engaging writing make the litany of misery enlightening, if not more bearable, reading. --Vanessa Bush
About the Author
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of fourteen books, including Dancing in the Streets and The New York Times bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. A frequent contributor to Harper’s and The Nation, she has also been a columnist at The New York Times and Time magazine.
Customer Reviews
A Wake-Up Call for America
America is in big trouble, asserts Ehrenreich. Greed is in the saddle and rides roughshod over democratic principles. The rich are getting richer; the poor are getting poorer; a once-healthy middle class has become an endangered species.
Whether writing of "Chasms of Inequality," "Meanness on the Rise," "Strangling the Middle Class," "Hell Day at Work," "Declining Health," "Getting Sex Straight," or "False Gods," Ehrenreich pulls no punches, gives no quarter, takes no captives.
The most serious threats to a deep morality, argues Ehrenhreich, are not abortionists, stem cell researchers, or matrimonially minded gays, but those who wage an unnecessary war and ruthlessly oppress the poor.
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and Pat Robertson will hate this book. Many grossly overpaid corporate CEO's and HMO bigwigs won't care much for it either.
One need not be a devotee of Karl Marx's Das Kapital to perceive (unless one is willfully blind) the dark underside of capitalism, which thrives on the cynical creed: "Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost!"
Is Ehrenreich's book agitprop or solid sociopolitical criticism? The reader's reaction will depend on his or her political stance. I believe This Land Is Their Land is right on point: a devastating critique of capitalism run amok. It's a wake-up call concerning the looting and fleecing of America.
If Ehrenreich sounds angry, outraged, and fighting mad, it's because she is. Hers is a righteous indignation against those who are destroying everything that moral and compassionate people hold dear.
Like an ancient prophet, she issues scathing indictments against plutocrats who trample on the poor. In her book one hears the thunderous voice of Amos: "Let justice roll on like a mighty river and righteousness like an everflowing stream."
An excerpt from the book: "How many 'wake-up calls' do we need, people--how many broken lives, drowned cities, depleted food pantries, people dead for lack of ordinary health care? We approach the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century in a bleak landscape cluttered with boarded-up homes and littered with broken dreams. . . . Why don't we dare say it? The looting of America has gone on too long, and the average American is too maxed out, overworked, and overspent to have anything left to take. We'll need a new deal, a new distribution of power and wealth, if we want to restore the beautiful idea that was 'America.'"
Depressing, but a must read book
When I told my husband that Barbara Ehrenreich's This Land is Their Land was a depressing book, he said that's because it's true. He told me not to read reality-based books if it's going to depress me.
Barbara Ehrenreich is the bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed, and Bait and Switch. She can call this book satirical commentary, but it's sad that her points about our government, our health care system, and our work force are actually right on target. Early on, she says that we've changed from a country where we felt we were all in it together, to one where the philosophy is closer to "I've got mine." She actually says, "Let the environment decay, the infrastructure crumble, the public hospitals close, the schools get by on bake sales, the workers drop from exhaustion - who cares?" We're now a nation of the haves and the have-nots, and more and more of us are becoming have-nots.
Ehrenreich points out that people are out of work, losing their homes, losing their health care, and no one is speaking up. Why aren't people complaining? We're letting our government and our businesses, such as Wal-Mart, control the country. And, they do a very good job of distracting us from the bad conditions in this country by pointing us in the direction of side issues, such as gay marriage and pro-life and pro-choice disagreements. She isn't the first one to say that illegal immigration is the latest distraction. "But it wasn't a Mexican who took away your pension or sold you on a dodgy mortgage." We're afraid for our jobs. We're afraid to lose our houses and our health care. It's not the first time in our country's history that a minority group has been selected as a scapegoat to distract us from the actual social conditions in this country.
The dictionary defines satire as "The use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc." Barbara Ehrenreich successfully uses sarcasm to do all of those things. She exposes the vices, follies and deceit behind our business practices, our health care practices, and our employment. She does a wonderful job in ridiculing our fascination with business success books, when the only people getting rich are the authors of those trite books. We could all take lessons from This Land is Their Land in denouncing the wrongs in this country.
I hope that Barbara Ehrenreich's This Land is Their Land is as successful as Nickel and Dimed. It's another important book, by a very important author. This book needs to be read, and discussed. Most of all, we need to take some action to change ourselves, and our country, before it's too late.
Sad But True
Barbara Ehrenreich uses sarcasm, anecdotes and humor to discuss the current major problems facing average Americans: The rich getting richer at the expense of the middle and lower classes; corporate greed and how it has created the loss of good paying jobs while making life hell for those still working; the lack of adequate health care for millions; and the way our government uses fear to distract us from these basic quality of life issues.
