This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation | Barbara Ehrenreich

This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation | Barbara Ehrenreich | GREED is killing America

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This Land Is Their...

	This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation Barbara Ehrenreich Metropolitan Books, 2008 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 21 reviews view larger image
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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)

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Deserves 25 stars

Ehrenreich has written some pretty solid stuff. Her "Nickel and Dimed" surveyed how she got some low-paying jobs and how she attempted to survive with them. In "Nickel and Dimed" she examined the white collar job search with all its frivolities--and failures. The list of her writings at the beginning of this text is impressive. So I expected comments from the eyes of a sharp, astute observer of contemporary affairs. I wasn't let down.

Don't get me wrong. This isn't some scholarly, dry diatribe. Rather, it's witty and observant on any number of contemporary subjects. In fact, truth be told, while reading it, I was also listening to the recorded version. It's the type of thing you might want to listen to while getting otherwise monotonous things done.

I warn you, though, as at least one other reviewer commented, it can be pretty depressing. Even the witty parts! For example, there's a commentary on one of the self-help texts particularly popular today. I think that's the essay she ends that, essentially, she'll one of these days be writing from a subsistance farm. (That people in 21st century America take balderdash like that seriously is frightening!)

Even in the introduction, she refers to that book, and to the fact that in the fiction category today, what's selling off the shelves is on the topic of a teenage, apprentice magician (my words, not hers).

What do you want to know about? Health insurance? CEO obscene pay scales? Abortion. Abstinence? Health insurance for your pets?? Each essay is just a few pages and will twist you a little. You won't know whether to laugh or cry.

As I think of it, perhaps the greatest value of the text is that it may entice some people not in Ehrenreich's "choir" to join it. Such a person can read it, laugh, then think about it while realizing that, "you know, what she says is true."

Yes, it is. And we need to acknowledge that and move onto a civilized society.

Read this, enjoy it, and passi it on. Ehrenreich's are words of wisdom!

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GREED is killing America

A must read for concerned citizens tho I don't see how we'd ever be able to turn the tide.

This is an easy quick read. And Ms. Ehrenreich puts it so well. But a rich person with a conscience is a rare bird. So nothing she or anyone else says will change a thing. The world of the rich is gated in denial. Glenn Beck that conservative political commentator on CNN claims to be a devout Christian yet his "Conservative Creed" is cold blooded/inhuman Survival-of-the-fittest, dog eat dog is the conservative, republican and libertarian way. It's not the moral nor civilized way tho. Children are the ones, in the end, who get hurt when government programs are cut.

I especially enjoyed her digs at religion and it's obsession with stem cell research, gay marriage (which I don't believe in either but...), and abortion. Small potatoes when compared to poverty, children with out health insurance, toxic pollution, the oil peak and decline, coming population explosions and most importantly the WATER shortages from droughts and over consumption/over population.

Excerpts
"It's hard to keep getting bent out of shape about a zygote or embryonic stem cell when you can't afford to take your sick three-year old to a doctor."

"...show me the passage in the Bible that bans stem cell research. See if you can find the tiniest allusion to abortion. Yes there is homophobia in the Bible, along with endorsements of slavery, and a weird obsession with animal sacrifice. Not a word, it should be mentioned, about gay marriage. Poverty and economic injustice, on the other hand get over three thousand hits in the Bible. Jesus was a hard-liner on the redistribution of wealth: remember what he told the rich man who wanted to get into heaven? Imagine what he'd have to say about the Bush tax cuts [for the rich]."

"If we are responsible for our actions, as most religions insist, then God should be too."

"Most countries are proud to have a health care system. It's an organized way of helping the sick and infirm - a mark of genuine civilization."

I disagree with her on immigration tho.

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timely and powerful

a powerful, insightful, yet human and humorous insight into the events and politics of our times. a concise critique of the real power brokers in the u.s. that are making the our nation feared and hated throughout the world. a strong call to oust the bush regime and his followers (mccain et al) and wij back our country.

"Worst Years of Our Lives" Redux

"Throughout the [insert decade],...Barbara Ehrenreich was making field notes: social, cultural, political, and economic. The notes appeared as short essays - elegant, trenchant, savagely angry, morally outraged and outrageously funny. The [insert number] essays collected here as [insert book name] sum up what Ms. Ehrenreich sees as the decade's salient features: blathering ignorance, smug hypocrisy, institutionalized fraud and vengeful polarization - all too dangerous to be merely absurd."

This blurb, a portion of which appears on the back book jacket of THIS LAND IS THEIR LAND, is actually taken from a 1990 New York Times review of Ms. Ehrenreich's 1990 work, THE WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, a rant against the 1980's. Yes, the savage anger is still there 18 years later, as is the moral outrage, but the funny is gone. Not that it matters, but two more of this book's blurbs come from reviews of the author's well-received NICKEL AND DIMED. Heaven only knows where the John Kenneth Galbraith blurb originates, but the great economist sadly passed away in 2006. Consider as well that Ms. Ehrenreich once rendered a gushing review of a Galbraith novel (yes, a novel!) entitled The Tenured Professor about which Library Journal commented with tongue firmly implanted in cheek, "...Galbraith shows that as a novelist, he is a fine economist."

What lies between the front and back covers of this book is a series of 62 vignettes, nearly all of a uniform, three-page length. They are grouped into larger topic areas: inequality, mean-spiritedness, squeezing the middle class, workplace follies and inequities, health care, gender politics, and religion. Most of them read like Op Ed opinion pieces from a major metropolitan newspaper columnist, usually ending with a satirical comment that often loops back to the opening sentences for a more dramatic closure. Ms. Ehrenreich makes no bones about her liberal leanings, and readers of a similar persuasion (myself one of them) will likely find themselves nodding in agreement at both her assertions and her sense of outrage.

Unfortunately, THIS LAND IS THEIR LAND emerges as not much more than a loosely-knit collection of short, caustic diatribes. It is a Dennis Miller rant or an episode of "Real Time with Bill Maher" (minus their humor) rendered in book form - entertaining for a few minutes with biting satire and self-righteous indignation, preaching to the choir exactly what they want to hear - but all hot air. There's nothing to show after the show beyond empty resignation and feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. A trail of cynicism and bitterness flows from the book like smoldering ashes, but little detail and nothing prescriptive emerges. Within hours of finishing, not one of the 62 "chapterlets" was memorable enough to recall in any but the vaguest of ways.

I adored NICKEL AND DIMED (2000) and cheered Ms. Ehrenreich for her near-total immersion into the world of blue-collar work. Her next field-research-through-lived-experience effort, BAIT AND SWITCH (2005), fell somewhat short of the mark but still yielded some fascinating insights in areas that even the author herself might not have anticipated. Now, in this most recent book, she leaves her well-trod path for one that allows her freedom to vent on nearly everything. The result not only fails to satisfy, it may leave even left-of-center readers feeling sullied and dispirited. What THIS LAND IS THEIR LAND regrettably shows is that (to paraphrase the Library Journal commentary above) as an essayist, Ms. Ehrenreich is a fine observer and reporter of the lived experience of everyday Americans. Her greatest strength and most effective moral suasion comes in telling the memorable stories of real American people and their daily struggles -- for human dignity and against large institutions. One hopes that she will return soon to that well-trod but far more engaging path.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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