Product Description: Lack of access to affordable high-quality child care is frequently the tipping point that catapults a family into poverty, joblessness, and homelessness -- a constant threat to the well-being of women and children. Polakow spent a year traveling around the country listening to low-income women from diverse backgrounds tell their stories of struggle, resilience, distress, and occasional success as they encountered ongoing child care crises...read more

Product Description: FDR’s Four Freedoms—Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear—were presented to the American people in his 1941 State of the Union address, and they became the inspiration for a second bill of rights, extending the New Deal and guaranteeing work, housing, medical care, and education...read more

Product Description: A sharp-witted knockdown of America’s love affair with positive thinking and an urgent call for a new commitment to realismAmericans are a “positive” people—cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat: this is our reputation as well as our self-image...read more

Product Description: Americans are a positive people -- cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat. This is our reputation as well as our self-image. In this utterly original take on the American frame of mind, Barbara Ehrenreich traces the strange career of our sunny outlook from its origins as a marginal nineteenth-century healing technique to its enshrinement as a dominant, almost mandatory, cultural attitude, and exposes the downside of irrational optimism...read more

America in the ’aughts—hilariously skewered, brilliantly dissected, and darkly diagnosed by the bestselling social critic hailed as “the soul mate”* of Jonathan SwiftBarbara 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)

Product Description: Toxic debt, rising job losses, collapsing commodity prices and expanding poverty. How can we rein in these beasts unleashed by the free market economy? People First Economics takes a long, hard look at the mess globalized capitalism is in, and shifts the focus back to where it belongs – putting the needs of people and the environment first...read more

Product Description: A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERAmericans are a "positive" people -- cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat: This is our reputation as well as our self-image. But more than a temperament, being positive is the key to getting success and prosperity...read more

Product Description: At the Heart of Work and Family presents original research on work and family by scholars who engage and build on the conceptual framework developed by well-known sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild. These concepts, such as "the second shift," "the economy of gratitude," "emotion work," "feeling rules," "gender strategies," and "the time bind," are basic to sociology and have shaped both popular discussions and academic study...read more

Product Description: Our sharpest and most original social critic goes "undercover" as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of American prosperity.Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them...read more

Product Description: The rules for finding professional work once seemed clear and unwavering: capture career highlights in a resume, practice answers to standard interview questions, and do lots of face-to-face networking. "Cracking the New Job Market" shows how these rules have changed and delivers new job-hunting strategies that actually work...read more

Product Description: Foreword by Barbara EhrenreichAuthor of Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War,and Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.Devouring lions, giant bears, sharp-taloned birds of prey, deadly snakes, and snapping alligators—these and other animal predators in search of human flesh are a staple of ancient mythology, along with their mythic counterparts—dragons, griffins, gorgons, harpies, and more...read more