Barbara Ehrenreich. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. 2001.
Moneyed professional writer decides as a journalistic experiment to try working for a living, for a couple of months anyway
Though there is noting especially remarkable about the prose (except for one or two sentences that cut through meters of fat and hit bone), though I am unspeakably jealous of a writer who takes a shit job by choice at the urging of her editor at Harper's (so she can write about the experience) and keeps it always at pencil's length as she always has a bank account to go back to, though the whole project risks earning one Ph.D. a bestseller and doing nothing whatsoever for the working poor beyond making them an exhibit in some Manhattan zoo, though she has no insight to bring to the real world into which she dips her pedigreed, manicured toenail, in the end she did do the work--waited tables, cleaned houses, fed Alzheimer's patients, and submerged the majority of her ego to pass as one of *them* and cringe in fear of forgettable middle manager dweebs. You go, Barbara.
But when the zoo closes its gates at the end of the book, the animals shiver in the cold night. And this book was published in the late 1990s, during an economic upturn. As of my reading of it, the minimum wage had risen once in a decade, the economy had fallen several times, and America had become much crueler.
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