Barbara Ehrenreich
All Books By Barbara Ehrenreich
Bait and Switch
- By: Barbara Ehrenreich
- Narrator: Anne Twomey
- Length: 6 hours 50 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: September 07, 2005
- Language: English
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3.5(4207 ratings)
The bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed goes back undercover to do for America’s ailing middle class what she did for the working poor.
Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed explored the lives of low-wage workers. Now, in BAIT AND SWITCH, she enters another hidden realm of the economy–the world of the white-collar unemployed. Armed with a plausible resume of a professional “in transition,” attempts to land a “middle class job” undergoing career coaching and personality testing, then begins trawling a series of EST-like “boot camps,” job fairs, “networking events,” and evangelical job-search “ministries.” She gets an “image makeover” to prepare her for the corporate world and works hard to project the “winning attitude” recommended for a successful job search. She is proselytized, scammed, lectured and, again and again, rejected.
BAIT AND SWITCH highlights the people who’ve done everything right–gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive resumes–yet have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster and not simply due to the vagaries of the business cycle. Today’s ultra-lean corporations take pride in shedding their “surplus” employees–plunging them, for months or years at a stretch, into the twilight zone of white-collar unemployment, where job-searching becomes a full-time job in itself. As Ehrenreich discovers, there are few social supports for the new disposable workers–and little security even for those who have jobs.
Like the now classic Nickel and Dimed, BAIT AND SWITCH is alternately hilarious and tragic, a searing expose of economic cruelty where we least expect it.
... Read moreBlood Rites
- By: Barbara Ehrenreich
- Narrator: Amy Landon
- Length: 9 hours 56 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: January 07, 2020
- Language: English
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3.91(56 ratings)
Bright-sided
- By: Barbara Ehrenreich
- Narrator: Kate Reading
- Length: 7 hours 27 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: October 13, 2009
- Language: English
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3.73(7651 ratings)
Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-sided is a sharp-witted knockdown of America’s love affair with positive thinking and an urgent call for a new commitment to realism
Americans are a “positive” people–cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat: this is our reputation as well as our self-image. But more than a temperament, being positive, we are told, is the key to success and prosperity.
In this utterly original take on the American frame of mind, Barbara Ehrenreich traces the strange career of our sunny outlook from its origins as a marginal nineteenth-century healing technique to its enshrinement as a dominant, almost mandatory, cultural attitude. Evangelical mega-churches preach the good news that you only have to want something to get it, because God wants to “prosper” you. The medical profession prescribes positive thinking for its presumed health benefits. Academia has made room for new departments of “positive psychology” and the “science of happiness.” Nowhere, though, has bright-siding taken firmer root than within the business community, where, as Ehrenreich shows, the refusal even to consider negative outcomes–like mortgage defaults–contributed directly to the current economic crisis.
With the mythbusting powers for which she is acclaimed, Ehrenreich exposes the downside of America’s penchant for positive thinking: On a personal level, it leads to self-blame and a morbid preoccupation with stamping out “negative” thoughts. On a national level, it’s brought us an era of irrational optimism resulting in disaster. This is Ehrenreich at her provocative best–poking holes in conventional wisdom and faux science, and ending with a call for existential clarity and courage.
... Read moreDancing in the Streets
- By: Barbara Ehrenreich
- Narrator: Pam Ward
- Length: 9 hours 29 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2006
- Language: English
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3.83(1032 ratings)
From bestselling social commentator and cultural historian Barbara Ehrenreich comes this fascinating exploration of one of humanity’s oldest traditions: the celebration of communal joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing. Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture, showing that such mass festivities have been indigenous to the West since the ancient Greeks. Though suppressed by elites who fear the undermining of social hierarchies, outbreaks of group revelry still persist, Ehrenreich shows, pointing to the 1960s rock-and-roll rebellion and the more recent “carnivalization” of sports.
Original, exhilarating, and deeply optimistic, Dancing in the Streets shows that we are innately social beings, impelled to share our joy and thereby envision a peaceable future.
... Read moreFear of Falling
- By: Barbara Ehrenreich
- Narrator: Carmela Marner
- Length: 9 hours 37 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: January 07, 2020
- Language: English
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3.98(456 ratings)
A brilliant and insightful exploration of the rise and fall of the American middle class by New York Times bestselling author, Barbara Ehrenreich.
Had I Known
- By: Barbara Ehrenreich
- Narrator: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 10 hours 50 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: March 24, 2020
- Language: English
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3.72(507 ratings)
A self-proclaimed “myth buster by trade,” Barbara Ehrenreich has covered an extensive range of topics as a journalist and political activist, and is unafraid to dive into intellectual waters that others deem too murky. Now, Had I Known gathers the articles and excerpts from a long-ranging career that most highlight Ehrenreich’s brilliance, social consciousness, and wry wit.
From Ehrenreich’s award-winning article “Welcome to Cancerland,” published shortly after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, to her groundbreaking undercover investigative journalism in Nickel and Dimed, to her exploration of death and mortality in the New York Times bestseller, Natural Causes, Barbara Ehrenreich has been writing radical, thought-provoking, and worldview-altering pieces for over four decades. Her reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review, among others, while her essays, op-eds and feature articles have appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, Time, the Wall Street Journal, and many more. Had I Known pulls from the vast and varied collection of one of our country’s most incisive thinkers to create one must-have volume.
Kipper’s Game
- By: Barbara Ehrenreich
- Narrator: Molly Parker Myers
- Length: 12 hours 19 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: January 07, 2020
- Language: English
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3.17(39 ratings)
From the New York Times bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed comes a futuristic thriller about science, love, politics, and social disarray.
Della Markson is searching for her son, a brilliant, nihilistic computer hacker who has invented an addictive computer game. She teams up with her former professor, Alex MacBride, an academic has-been desperately in need of a publication and a drink, is looking for the papers of an obscure, long-dead neurobiologist. As they stumble through a suburban landscape littered with broken marriages and blighted careers, they discover that their personal quests are of great interest to mysterious others, and that they have been drawn into a grand design full of wondrous possibilities and perilous meanings.
For Della and Alex live in a hyper-real world of strange portents and accelerating decay. Caterpillars are destroying the trees. A cracked but eerily lucid evangelist preaches apocalypse on a pirate frequency. And in the renowned biological research institute where Della and Alex work, escaped laboratory animals roam the corridors, hazardous wastes leak unchecked, and a lethal new disease is outwitting the researchers. The search for Della’s son and Alex’s missing papers turns out to hinge on the ancient quest for the ultimate purpose of human intelligence and life.
A startling feat of the imagination from one of our sharpest social observers, Kipper’s Game is a daring and sophisticated adventure at the interface of science and metaphysics, human love and the equally human hunger for knowledge.
Living with a Wild God
- By: Barbara Ehrenreich
- Narrator: Barbara Ehrenreich
- Length: 8 hours 41 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: April 08, 2014
- Language: English
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3.35(4147 ratings)
From the New York Times bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed comes a brave, frank, and exquisitely written memoir that will change the way you see the world.
Barbara Ehrenreich is one of the most important thinkers of our time. Educated as a scientist, she is an author, journalist, activist, and advocate for social justice. In Living With a Wild God, she recounts her quest-beginning in childhood-to find “”the Truth”” about the universe and everything else: What’s really going on? Why are we here? In middle age, she rediscovered the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence, which records an event so strange, so cataclysmic, that she had never, in all the intervening years, written or spoken about it to anyone. It was the kind of event that people call a “”mystical experience””-and, to a steadfast atheist and rationalist, nothing less than shattering.
In Living With a Wild God, Ehrenreich reconstructs her childhood mission, bringing an older woman’s wry and erudite perspective to a young girl’s impassioned obsession with the questions that, at one point or another, torment us all. The result is both deeply personal and cosmically sweeping-a searing memoir and a profound reflection on science, religion, and the human condition. With her signature combination of intellectual rigor and uninhibited imagination, Ehrenreich offers a true literary achievement-a work that has the power not only to entertain but amaze.
... Read moreNatural Causes
- By: Barbara Ehrenreich
- Narrator: Joyce Bean
- Length: 6 hours 53 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: April 10, 2018
- Language: English
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3.26(4755 ratings)
A razor-sharp polemic which offers an entirely new understanding of our bodies, ourselves, and our place in the universe, Natural Causes describes how we over-prepare and worry way too much about what is inevitable. One by one, Ehrenreich topples the shibboleths that guide our attempts to live a long, healthy life — from the importance of preventive medical screenings to the concepts of wellness and mindfulness, from dietary fads to fitness culture.
But Natural Causes goes deeper — into the fundamental unreliability of our bodies and even our “mind-bodies,” to use the fashionable term. Starting with the mysterious and seldom-acknowledged tendency of our own immune cells to promote deadly cancers, Ehrenreich looks into the cellular basis of aging, and shows how little control we actually have over it. We tend to believe we have agency over our bodies, our minds, and even over the manner of our deaths. But the latest science shows that the microscopic subunits of our bodies make their own “decisions,” and not always in our favor.
We may buy expensive anti-aging products or cosmetic surgery, get preventive screenings and eat more kale, or throw ourselves into meditation and spirituality. But all these things offer only the illusion of control. How to live well, even joyously, while accepting our mortality — that is the vitally important philosophical challenge of this book.
Drawing on varied sources, from personal experience and sociological trends to pop culture and current scientific literature, Natural Causes examines the ways in which we obsess over death, our bodies, and our health. Both funny and caustic, Ehrenreich then tackles the seemingly unsolvable problem of how we might better prepare ourselves for the end — while still reveling in the lives that remain to us.
Nickel and Dimed
- By: Barbara Ehrenreich
- Narrator: Barbara Ehrenreich
- Length: 8 hours 15 minutes
- Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
- Publish date: August 13, 2004
- Language: English
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3.65(181258 ratings)
This engrossing piece of undercover reportage is a New York Times best-seller. With nearly a million copies in print, Nickel and Dimed is a modern classic that deftly portrays the plight of America’s working-class poor. Author Barbara Ehrenreich decides to see if she can scratch out a comfortable living in blue-collar America. What she discovers is a culture of desperation, where workers often take multiple low-paying jobs just to keep a roof overhead.
... Read moreThis Land Is Their Land
- By: Barbara Ehrenreich
- Length: 5 hours 48 minutes
- Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
- Publish date: July 08, 2008
- Language: English
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4(1 ratings)
Barbara Ehrenreich’s first book of satirical commentary, The Worst Years of Our Lives, which was 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.