This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation

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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.”

What Customers Say About This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation:

Read her and match her observations w/your own. I respect Ehrenrich even when she's over the top. I do. Quick shipping service. After reading library copy, I bought this for my own library, something I seldom do these days.

Not one of her better works. Witty as always, Ehrenreich rambles on about everything that irks her, and at the end of this random rant has not made a single valid point.

Now maybe this will get someone's attention. I have been writing everywhere to find out how to return this item, as it does not play.

If you haven't read her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America yet, I'd recommend that as a better choice. However, as a collection, there is a lot of repetition and overlap, which is not surprising.Good read, but not great. I'm a fan of Barbara Ehrenreich, but this collection of her essays is relatively repetitive. Her focus is on the ever growing gap between the have and the have-nots, and individually, each essay stands pretty well on its own.

It didn't take her book Nickel & Dimed to prove to me that people are suffering. Imagine living in New York City and having to support three kids on $10 an hour and having a 1 hour commute in either direction. I know that people are getting up at 5 a.m. I know this because I once had to commute forever to a job that barely paid.

When you don't have children, it's easier to survive. This ought to scare some people into putting off having children. In some towns, people have no choice but to work for WalMart, while the local construction jobs go to illegal immigrants. You'll have more time to get an education, have a career, gain skills, and build your life. Meanwhile, people are still having kids when they know they can't support them.BIRTH CONTROL is the cure for all of our country's ills. I know that minimum wage jobs are grueling and I know you can't pay the bills on them.

But unfortunately, it doesn't.One of the reasons behind the power of WalMart and other bad employers is that there is too much cheap labor in the USA. As long as teenage pregnancy looks cool, and as long as women are having babies by lousy men, things are not going to improve. for long commutes to low-paying jobs (if they pay at all). The difference is that I have no children to support.I see hoards of single mothers who have grueling minimum-wage jobs and have no time for their children.