Barbara Ehrenreich

A self-proclaimed 'myth buster by trade', over her long-ranging career as a journalist and political activist, Barbara Ehrenreich has delved with devastating wit and insight into the social and political fabric of America. Had I Known gathers together Ehrenreich's most significant articles and excerpts from the last four decades—some of which became the starting point for her bestselling books. From...

Middle class executives are the people who've done everything right—gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive résumés—yet they have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster. In Bait and Switch, Ehrenreich enters a shadowy world of Internet job searches, lonely networking events, and costly career-coaching sessions, a world in which 'professional' mentors and trainers offer pop-psychology and self-help...

Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. She discovers that the same elements come up in every human culture throughout history: a love of masking, carnival, music-making and dance. Although sixteenth-century Europeans began to view mass festivities as foreign and savage, Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks' worship...

Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. Leaving her home, she took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity, exposing the darker side of American prosperity and the...

The New York Times BestsellerALA Alex Award WinnerChristopher Award Winner "Captivating . . . promise that you will read this explosive little book cover to cover and pass it on to all your friends and relatives."--The New York Times The New York Times bestselling work of undercover reportage from our sharpest and most original social critic, with a new foreword...

In this highly original and hugely entertaining account, Barbara Ehrenreich confronts the cult of positive thinking in America. She examines the impact of positive thinking on religion, medicine, academia, and the business community, and exposes the psychological effects of a world which tells us to 'put on a happy face'. From the pink ribbons and platitudes that surround breast cancer...

We tend to believe we have agency over our bodies, our minds and even our deaths. Yet emerging science challenges our assumptions of mastery: at the microscopic level, the cells in our bodies facilitate tumours and attack other cells, with life-threatening consequences. In this revelatory book, Natural Causes, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that our bodies are a battleground over which we...