This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation

America in the aughts—hilariously skewered, brilliantly dissected, and darkly diagnosed by one of the countrys most prominent social critics

Now in paperback, Barbara Ehrenreichs widely acclaimed This Land Is Their Land takes the measure of what we are left with after the cruelest decade in memory and finds lurid extremes all around. While members of the moneyed elite have bought up 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 Masters of the Universe have thrown themselves into the casino economy, the less fortunate have been fed a diet of morality, marriage, and abstinence. With perfect satiric pitch, Ehrenreich reveals a country scarred by deepening inequality, corroded by distrust, and shamed by its official cruelty.

Full of wit and generosity, these reports from a divided nation—including new and unpublished essays—confirm once again that Ehrenreich is, as the San Francisco Chronicle proclaims, “essential reading.”

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of fourteen books, including Dancing in the Streets and The New York Times bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. A frequent contributor to Harpers and The Nation, she has also been a columnist at The New York Times and Time magazine.

In her second book of satirical commentary, Barbara Ehrenreich subjects the 'aughts to the most biting and incisive satire of her career.  She points to shortfalls in the US's standards of health care, employment, education, immigration, and personal liberties.  She also looks beyond those issues to the great inadequacies in the modern American standard of living.

Taking the measure of what America has 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. Ehrenreichs 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.   

With research and wit, Ehrenreich dissects and humanizes the social problems that plague the U.S. as a whole, even though it remains a nation divided. "Ehrenreich is at her best (and shes very, very good) when chronicling the outrageous human downside of our economy, the costs it imposes on people who cant afford a bacon-infused old-fashioned. Theres 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.' Theres 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, Ehrenreichs account of her own experience working undercover in the low-wage economy."—Eve Fairbanks, The New York Times Book Review  "Ehrenreich is at her best (and shes very, very good) when chronicling the outrageous human downside of our economy, the costs it imposes on people who cant afford a bacon-infused old-fashioned. Theres 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.' Theres 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, Ehrenreichs 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 MSNBCanalyst 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

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)

In her first work of satirical commentary, "The Worst Years of Our Lives," Barbara Ehrenreich skewered the Reagan era. Now she brilliantly dissects one of the cruelest decades in memory-the 2000s-in which she finds a nation scarred by deepening inequality, corroded by distrust, and shamed by its official cruelty.

America in the aughts—hilariously skewered, brilliantly dissected, and darkly diagnosed by one of the countrys most prominent social critics

Now in paperback, Barbara Ehrenreichs widely acclaimed This Land Is Their Land takes the measure of what we are left with after the cruelest decade in memory and finds lurid extremes all around. While members of the moneyed elite have bought up 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 Masters of the Universe have thrown themselves into the casino economy, the less fortunate have been fed a diet of morality, marriage, and abstinence. With perfect satiric pitch, Ehrenreich reveals a country scarred by deepening inequality, corroded by distrust, and shamed by its official cruelty.

Full of wit and generosity, these reports from a divided nation—including new and unpublished essays—confirm once again that Ehrenreich is, as the San Francisco Chronicle proclaims, “essential reading.”

America in the aughtshilariously skewered, brilliantly dissected, and darkly diagnosed by one of the countrys most prominent social critics

Now in paperback, Barbara Ehrenreichs widely acclaimed This Land Is Their Land takes the measure of what we are left with after the cruelest decade in memory and finds lurid extremes all around. While members of the moneyed elite have bought up 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 Masters of the Universe have thrown themselves into the casino economy, the less fortunate have been fed a diet of morality, marriage, and abstinence. With perfect satiric pitch, Ehrenreich reveals a country scarred by deepening inequality, corroded by distrust, and shamed by its official cruelty.

Full of wit and generosity, these reports from a divided nationincluding new and unpublished essaysconfirm once again that Ehrenreich is, as the San Francisco Chronicle proclaims, “essential reading.”

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of fourteen books, including Dancing in the Streets and The New York Times bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. A frequent contributor to Harpers and The Nation, she has also been a columnist at The New York Times and Time magazine.

In her second book of satirical commentary, Barbara Ehrenreich subjects the 'aughts to the most biting and incisive satire of her career.  She points to shortfalls in the US's standards of health care, employment, education, immigration, and personal liberties.  She also looks beyond those issues to the great inadequacies in the modern American standard of living.

Taking the measure of what America has 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. Ehrenreichs 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.   

With research and wit, Ehrenreich dissects and humanizes the social problems that plague the U.S. as a whole, even though it remains a nation divided. "Ehrenreich is at her best (and shes very, very good) when chronicling the outrageous human downside of our economy, the costs it imposes on people who cant afford a bacon-infused old-fashioned. Theres 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.' Theres 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, Ehrenreichs account of her own experience working undercover in the low-wage economy."Eve Fairbanks, The New York Times Book Review  "Ehrenreich is at her best (and shes very, very good) when chronicling the outrageous human downside of our economy, the costs it imposes on people who cant afford a bacon-infused old-fashioned. Theres 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.' Theres 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, Ehrenreichs 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 mostthe 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 cultureskewering 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 policiesfor 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

Barbara Ehrenreich is the bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch, Bright-sided, Dancing in the Streets and Blood Rites, among others. A frequent contributor to Harper's and The Nation, she has also been a columnist at The New York Times and Time magazine. She is the winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize for Current Interest and ALA Notable Books for Nonfiction. Ehrenreich was born in Butte, Montana, when it was still a bustling mining town. She studied physics at Reed College, and earned a Ph.D. in cell biology from Rockefeller University. Rather than going into laboratory work, she got involved in activism, and soon devoted herself to writing her innovative journalism. She lives and works in Florida.