Mencken has assailed the smug rhetoric of prosperity with such scalpel-like precision and ferocious wit.” “A brilliant on-the-job report from the dark side of the boom. You will never see anything–from a motel bathroom to a restaurant meal–in quite the same way again. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich’s perspective and for a rare view of how “prosperity” looks from the bottom. 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. She also learned that one job is not enough you need at least two if you int to live indoors. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly “unskilled,” that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. 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. To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? 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. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. 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.

Getting nickel and dimed