This Land Is Their Land

"Ehrenreich is at her best (and she's very, very good) when chronicling the outrageous human downside of our economy, the costs it imposes on people who can't afford a bacon-infused old-fashioned. There's the hospital worker whose employer garnished her paycheck for an emergency room visit, 'a condition of debt servitude reminiscent of early-20th-century company towns.' There's the poor man who got himself arrested in order to live more comfortably in prison, because 'we are reaching the point . . . where the largest public housing program in America will be our penitentiary system' . . . A tight and chilling companion volume to Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich's account of her own experience working undercover in the low-wage economy."—Eve Fairbanks, The New York Times Book Review

"The best of the pieces are something quite different from journalism. They are small absurdist gems . . . Ms. Ehrenreich's acts of kindness, by no means random, aim to kill. And, in a larger sense, to save."—The New York Times

"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

"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

"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 Christian right, et al.—have cut wages, increased insurance premiums, slashed social programs and forced the middle class onto a narrow ledge . . . Ehrenreich rages against injustices in her new book. Separated into seven sections and written in short, pithy chapters (about five pages a pop) that are chock-full of disgraceful facts and ignominious examples, This Land Is Theirs Land will boil the blood of any compassionate reader . . . Ehrenreich has a Twain-like talent of turning a phrase, which makes her much fun to read, and downright irrefutable . . . For those who truly care about what America has to offer 'the huddled masses [and for that matter the regular masses] yearning to breath free' in a post-9/11 world, This Land Is Their Land is essential reading. And in an election, year the timing couldn't be better."—Richard Horan, San Francisco Chronicle

"A collection of fierce polemics on the sorry state of American society from social critic, essayist and journalist Ehrenreich. The author sees the United States as increasingly polarized into the self-indulgent superrich and the downtrodden poor, with a shrinking middle class in between. As in Nickel and Dimed, she writes vividly about the plight of those struggling to make ends meet with minimum-wage jobs, and her wrath is directed at those she sees as their oppressors: the financial industry, the private health-insurance industry, medical professionals, airlines, oil companies and big-box stores-especially Wal-Mart, though Target is a target too. Ehrenreich harbors a special scorn for the lifestyle of mega-wealthy hedge-fund managers, but others who wear the black hat are President Bush, CEOs and college administrators . . . Her witty, quite brief chapters, some only two or three pages long, are organized into themed sections with such charged titles as 'Meanness on the Rise' and 'Hell Day at Work' . . . Provocative, angry and funny, often at the same time."—Kirkus Reviews

"Ehrenreich laments, 'I flinch when I hear Woody Guthrie's line "This land belongs to you and me." Somehow I don't think it was meant to be sung by a chorus of hedge fund operators.' In this collection of essays and commentaries on the U.S. economic and social divide-turned-chasm, she looks at a wide range of topics including extravagant corporate CEO bailouts, pharmaceutical companies' recruitment of college cheerleaders as sales reps, and xenophobic children living in gated communities. Readers of her previous books will not be surprised that Wal-Mart and the private health insurance industry are frequent targets of her acerbic wit. In Swiftian style, Ehrenreich suggests that families unable to obtain health-care coverage for their children should buy pet health insurance for them, and she blithely maintains that employers have cut wages and benefits to such levels that it is safe to assume employees will soon be asked to pay their boss for the privilege of working. In a droll postscript, she invites readers to visit a web site where they can be matched up with a new country appropriate to their tastes and values since nationality is one of the 'few things that can be changed without surgery.'"—Jill Ortner, Library Journal

"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 . . . 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?"—Publishers Weekly