|
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.” —*The Times (London) 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. 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 United States' 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. "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
|
