nickel and dimed book review essay

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Nickel And Dimed: Book Review

Category Literature
Subcategory Book
Topic Nickel and Dimed

I found out while reading the book that from the beginning, she already has a negative expectation about how life would be with such a low wage. She attempts to prove herself right so that the experiment would meet her expectations. I think she has built the theme of the book on something she was already convinced in without doing this experiment.

Obviously, she had sympathy for the poor but at the same time, I think she shows unintentionally her superiority; mentioning several times her native English accent and her whiteness. Off course, it would be wholly unfair to deny that she has good intentions to improve society but the readers can find traces of class distinctions.

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Making the experiment, she stepped out of her comfort zone and abandoned her luxurious life for 3 months. However, I do not think it’s an experiment that any low wage worker can identify with because she was raised in an educated middle-class family that hadn’t experienced poverty, she had money “in case she needed something” and most importantly, she didn’t have the fear of getting fired and she didn’t hesitate to quit whenever she felt fed up. All of these facts prove that she made this experiment as an anthropologist in order to discover a different world knowing well that the consequences of losing a job could be contained, unlike the real poor who don’t share that luxury. What is poverty if limited?

However, it was an interesting study to introduce the difficulties that minimum wage workers have to deal with every day. It’s an eye-opener and perspective changer as it destroys the stereotype that the poor are poor because they are lazy. On the contrary, she shows how hard it is to have physically exhausting and mentally challenging jobs and how it is almost impossible to make it on law wages. She wants to make sure that having a job doesn’t mean getting out of poverty.

Nickel and Dimed is at once a document of the contemporary financial problems of the poor in the US, and it’s an interesting book which can be read like a diary of a part of the author’s life. The book is not free of satire and comedy but this comedy is always linked with sadness; it aimed at the unjust society which turn a blind eye to its least well-off citizens.

Essentially, the book blames American society because low pay workers are somehow trapped as they are forced to take on more than one low wage job just to afford putting food on the table and enable their families to survive and they have no means or money to improve their situation through education.

This book is worth reading to know about the daily life of the law wage workers and it’s also important to educate the rich about the poor who often take the brunt of poverty, especially women. Unfortunately, we’re still living in a world where social classes try to be but can’t be equal.

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NICKEL AND DIMED

On (not) getting by in boom-time america.

by Barbara Ehrenreich ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 8, 2001

Sharp, empathetic, astute, Ehrenreich speaks loudly and eloquently for a group of workers who are often too tired and too...

With wit and anger, a celebrated social commentator paints a brutal portrait of the world of low-wage work during the 1990s, when “welfare as we know it” was about to end and America was at the crest of its biggest economic wave in history.

How do millions of the poor (especially the unskilled and often illiterate young mothers now forced off welfare and into the labor market) get by on minimum-wage jobs? Ehrenreich ( Blood Rites , 1997, etc.) decided to try for herself, and began a new life as a waitress in Florida earning $2.43 an hour plus tips. Moving next to Maine, she worked during the week for a housecleaning service ($6.65 an hour), and on weekends for an old-age home ($7). Later on, she moved to Minnesota and took a job at Wal-Mart ($7). Everywhere she went she faced a great scarcity of affordable housing, and at one point she was paying $245 a week (more than her net salary) for a run-down motel with no lock on the door and no screen on the window. As for health care—well, what can be done about illness or pain when (1) you can’t afford to miss a day of work, and (2) health benefits, if they even exist, are lousy? Ehrenreich found that most of her fellow workers, despite their financial, physical, and emotional burdens, were kind, generous, and diligent—not slothful or embittered as some observers would have it. Her personal experiences are bolstered with statistics on jobs, wages, and services available (fewer and fewer). Is there an answer? More government support in terms of housing and childcare subsidies would help, she says; so might unions. But the most important improvement would be a better understanding (on the part of those who can effect change) that it is the working poor who are the “major philanthropists of our society,” sacrificing health, family, even nourishment, to sustain those above them in the food chain.

Pub Date: May 8, 2001

ISBN: 0-8050-6388-9

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001

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GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.

It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty , 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.

Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0

Page Count: 432

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.

Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”

Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

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Nickel and Dimed

Barbara ehrenreich, everything you need for every book you read..

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Nickel and Dimed: Introduction

Nickel and dimed: plot summary, nickel and dimed: detailed summary & analysis, nickel and dimed: themes, nickel and dimed: quotes, nickel and dimed: characters, nickel and dimed: symbols, nickel and dimed: theme wheel, brief biography of barbara ehrenreich.

Historical Context of Nickel and Dimed

Other books related to nickel and dimed.

Full Title: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
When Written: 1998-2000
Where Written: United States (Florida, Maine, Minnesota)
When Published: 2001 (with an afterword from 2008)
Literary Period: Contemporary
Genre: Reportage/Memoir
Setting: Key West, Florida; Portland, Maine; Minneapolis, Minnesota
Climax: Each chapter has its own climax, but one scene in Maine is particularly climactic. After growing increasingly frustrated with the way her team leader at The Maids, Holly, must stoically work through dizziness, pain, and stress, Barbara screams into the phone at her boss, Ted, fuming at his willingness to put profits above the well-being of his workers.
Antagonist: In general, Barbara’s antagonist is economic culture in America, which accepts the acute distress of low-wage work as a given. She recognizes that such an antagonist is intangible and difficult to pin down, so she constructs more material antagonists in her bosses, including Ted and Howard, as well as the more faceless corporations for which she works.
Point of View: First person

Extra Credit for Nickel and Dimed

Seeing Things? Though Ehrenreich calls herself an atheist in Nickel and Dimed , she describes her experiences of mysticism and “seeing God” as an adolescent in her most recent book, Living With a Wild God .

Nickel and Dimed

54 pages • 1 hour read

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction

Key Figures

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Have any of your assumptions or views about blue-collar workers changed after reading Nickel and Dimed? Address two to three moments where Ehrenreich’s study may have challenged your own assumptions about impoverishment.

What are your thoughts on the ethical implications of Ehrenreich’s journalistic methods? Do you believe that the experiment was conducted in accordance with the highest principles of honesty? Would you alter any aspects of the experiment and, if so, in what ways would you revise the experiment if you were to conduct it?

Housing is one of the biggest obstacles Ehrenreich deals with within the book. How has the housing crisis changed since the book was published in 2001? Have there been any improvements? In what ways is it worse now than it was then? What are the likely implications of these changes for workers now?

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Home / Essay Samples / Literature / Nickel and Dimed / A Review Of The Book Nickel And Dimed

A Review Of The Book Nickel And Dimed

Category: Literature
Topic: Book Review , Nickel and Dimed

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