This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation [Hardcover]

Barbara Ehrenreich (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 24, 2008

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)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When a hospital employee whose hospital-supplied insurance doesn't cover her hospital-incurred bill finds her wages garnished, where's a political satirist to go for material? 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—even when yesterday's headlines provide the immediate provocation, e.g., JetBlue's snow snafu. The vignettes go down a bit like eating peanuts—too many at one time palls, but they're not unhealthy, unless you have an allergic reaction to 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...? (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Despite long national claims to being a classless society, the U.S. has a growing gulch between the haves and have-nots and what used to be the middle class. Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed (2001) and Bait and Switch (2005), catalogs the many ways that the rich are getting richer and the rest of us are getting poorer. The new top of the polarized social order has “pay in the tens of hundreds of millions, a private jet and a few acres of Nantucket,” and the new bottom is virtual slavery—captive domestics, sweatshop workers, and sex slaves exploited by their employers. She details the huge compensation gaps between CEOs and other management, top-ranked professors and adjunct professors, law firm partners and temp lawyers. In separate sections, Ehrenreich analyzes how wealthy individuals and corporations maintain the gap by engineering social, political, and economic policies that continue to disadvantage the middle class and poor, and our accommodation to it. Ehrenreich’s sharp analysis and engaging writing make the litany of misery enlightening, if not more bearable, reading. --Vanessa Bush

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books; First Edition edition (June 24, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805088407
• ISBN-13: 978-0805088403
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #713,324 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

BARBARA EHRENREICH is the author of fourteen books, including the bestselling Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. She lives in Virginia, USA.

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

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#81 in Books > Business & Investing

#81 in Books > Business & Investing

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

120 of 130 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Wake-Up Call for America June 27, 2008

By Roy E. Perry

Format:Hardcover

America is in big trouble, asserts Ehrenreich. Greed is in the saddle and rides roughshod over democratic principles. The rich are getting richer; the poor are getting poorer; a once-healthy middle class has become an endangered species.

Whether writing of "Chasms of Inequality," "Meanness on the Rise," "Strangling the Middle Class," "Hell Day at Work," "Declining Health," "Getting Sex Straight," or "False Gods," Ehrenreich pulls no punches, gives no quarter, takes no captives.

The most serious threats to a deep morality, argues Ehrenhreich, are not abortionists, stem cell researchers, or matrimonially minded gays, but those who wage an unnecessary war and ruthlessly oppress the poor.

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and Pat Robertson will hate this book. Many grossly overpaid corporate CEO's and HMO bigwigs won't care much for it either.

One need not be a devotee of Karl Marx's Das Kapital to perceive (unless one is willfully blind) the dark underside of capitalism, which thrives on the cynical creed: "Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost!"

Is Ehrenreich's book agitprop or solid sociopolitical criticism? The reader's reaction will depend on his or her political stance. I believe This Land Is Their Land is right on point: a devastating critique of capitalism run amok. It's a wake-up call concerning the looting and fleecing of America.

If Ehrenreich sounds angry, outraged, and fighting mad, it's because she is. Hers is a righteous indignation against those who are destroying everything that moral and compassionate people hold dear.

Like an ancient prophet, she issues scathing indictments against plutocrats who trample on the poor.... In her book one hears the thunderous voice of Amos: "Let justice roll on like a mighty river and righteousness like an everflowing stream."

An excerpt from the book: "How many 'wake-up calls' do we need, people--how many broken lives, drowned cities, depleted food pantries, people dead for lack of ordinary health care? We approach the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century in a bleak landscape cluttered with boarded-up homes and littered with broken dreams. . . . Why don't we dare say it? The looting of America has gone on too long, and the average American is too maxed out, overworked, and overspent to have anything left to take. We'll need a new deal, a new distribution of power and wealth, if we want to restore the beautiful idea that was 'America.'" Read more ›

54 of 58 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Depressing, but a must read book July 8, 2008

By Lesa Holstine VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

When I told my husband that Barbara Ehrenreich's This Land is Their Land was a depressing book, he said that's because it's true. He told me not to read reality-based books if it's going to depress me.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed, and Bait and Switch. She can call this book satirical commentary, but it's sad that her points about our government, our health care system, and our work force are actually right on target. Early on, she says that we've changed from a country where we felt we were all in it together, to one where the philosophy is closer to "I've got mine." She actually says, "Let the environment decay, the infrastructure crumble, the public hospitals close, the schools get by on bake sales, the workers drop from exhaustion - who cares?" We're now a nation of the haves and the have-nots, and more and more of us are becoming have-nots.

Ehrenreich points out that people are out of work, losing their homes, losing their health care, and no one is speaking up. Why aren't people complaining? We're letting our government and our businesses, such as Wal-Mart, control the country. And, they do a very good job of distracting us from the bad conditions in this country by pointing us in the direction of side issues, such as gay marriage and pro-life and pro-choice disagreements. She isn't the first one to say that illegal immigration is the latest distraction. "But it wasn't a Mexican who took away your pension or sold you on a dodgy mortgage." We're afraid for our jobs. We're afraid to lose our houses and our health care. It's not the first time in our country's history that a minority group has been selected as a scapegoat to distract us from the actual social conditions in this country....

The dictionary defines satire as "The use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc." Barbara Ehrenreich successfully uses sarcasm to do all of those things. She exposes the vices, follies and deceit behind our business practices, our health care practices, and our employment. She does a wonderful job in ridiculing our fascination with business success books, when the only people getting rich are the authors of those trite books. We could all take lessons from This Land is Their Land in denouncing the wrongs in this country.

I hope that Barbara Ehrenreich's This Land is Their Land is as successful as Nickel and Dimed. It's another important book, by a very important author. This book needs to be read, and discussed. Most of all, we need to take some action to change ourselves, and our country, before it's too late. Read more ›

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Sad But True August 3, 2008

By Rae

Format:Hardcover

Barbara Ehrenreich uses sarcasm, anecdotes and humor to discuss the current major problems facing average Americans: The rich getting richer at the expense of the middle and lower classes; corporate greed and how it has created the loss of good paying jobs while making life hell for those still working; the lack of adequate health care for millions; and the way our government uses fear to distract us from these basic quality of life issues.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Re-energizing dimmed critical faculties July 22, 2008

By Kerry Walters VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Ehrenreich's latest is a collection of occasional and pithy pieces published in magazines and on her blog. They're not densely argued like her more scholarly books (e.g., Blood Rites), nor sustained like her best-selling Nickel and Dimed. Instead they're intended as shots over the bow (and sometimes shots aimed straight into it!), quick broadcasts that alert the reader to things that ought to be more widely known. They're indignant, angry, sarcastic, and incendiary. But they're also sure to raise your blood pressure, and do something about "our critical faculties dimmed by habit" (p. 6). They're also great fun to read.

Ehrenreich examines social, economic, and political issues that she collects into seven categories: inequality, hard-heartedness (or what she calls "meanness"), the sinking middle class, abuse of the working guy or gal, the health care crisis, sexuality, and religion. Along the way, she compares the astronomical cost of heating your home and the equally astronomical earnings and CEO salaries of the major fuel companies (26-28); reflects on the mean-spirited social tactic of shaming that's become so prevalent(67-69); wonders why the government pundits are only now admitting recession, when 57% of polled citizens knew we were in one a year ago (94-97); exposes the latest trend in corporate "efficiency" of firing well-salaried workers and replacing them with minimum wage beginners (Circuit City in particular comes under fire)(105-07); points out the sheer surreality of spending $10 billion a year on pet health care when our medical response to human kids is so abyssmal (158-160); takes on the shibboleth of family values (197-99); examines the relationship of megachurches to conservative politics (216-19)....

The book is subtitled "Reports from a Divided Nation," and if Ehrenreich is correct, we certainly are divided--between haves and have-nots, overprivileged and underpriviledged, socially proper and outcast, right-with-God and infidel. But she's hopeful that the divisions can be ameliorated. As she poignantly says in the Introduction, "I like to think we could find in our hearts some true ground for unity, some awareness of a common condition and collective aspiration" (p. 7).

Well worth reading and thinking about. Read more ›