This land is their land
Subtitle: reports from a divided nation
By: Barbara Ehrenreich.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Published: 2008
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 235
ISBN-13: 9780805088403
Subjects: Social problems -- United States; United States -- Social conditions
Description: The author's second work of satirical commentary reflects on 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. Her first book of satirical commentary, The Worst Years of Our Lives, was about the Reagan era. 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 book she subjects them to biting and incisive satire. Taking the measure of what we are left with after the cruelest decade in memory, she 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. Her anecdotes 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 rage against those who have given us a nation scarred by deepening inequality, corroded by distrust, and shamed by its official cruelty.
Notes: Includes index.