Book Description
Illustrated by Darcie Park
From the manmade glitter of the Las Vegas strip to the natural splendor of Lake Tahoe, Nevada's riches go beyond the silver and gold found in Virginia City. S is for Silver showcases the hardy wildlife (the Desert Bighorn Sheep and the desert tortoise) and even hardier pioneers (the builders of the Hoover Dam) who shaped Nevada's landscape and character.
Eleanor Coerr began her professional life as a newspaper reporter and editor of a column for children. She taught children's literature at Monterey Peninsula College and creative writing at Chapman College in California. For the past 25 years, Eleanor has been writing children's books, lecturing, and visiting schools across the United States and abroad. Her previous children's books include Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes and The Big Balloon Race. Eleanor shares her time between Henderson, Nevada and Pebble Beach, California.
Darcie Park was born and raised in Long Beach, California, and started drawing when she was five years old. She graduated with a BFA in illustration form California State University, Long Beach. She started her freelance illustration career in college and illustrated her first children's book, The Reluctant Dragon, her first year out of college. Darcie makes her home in Lake Tahoe.
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The West: Arizona, Nevada, Utah (Let's Discover the States)
Thomas G. Aylesworth
Manufacturer: Chelsea House Publications
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ASIN: 1555465633 |
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Discover Nevada (The Nevada Experience)
Carole Marsh , and
Kathy Zimmer
Manufacturer: Gallopade International
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Let's Discover Nevada Lab Pack
Carole Marsh
Manufacturer: Gallopade International
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ASIN: 0635005867 |
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Let's Discover Nevada Library License
Carole Marsh
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ASIN: 0635012669 |
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Let's Discover Nevada Site License
Carole Marsh
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ASIN: 0635006146 |
Amazon.com's Best of 2001
Essayist and cultural critic Barbara Ehrenreich has always specialized in turning received wisdom on its head with intelligence, clarity, and verve. With some 12 million women being pushed into the labor market by welfare reform, she decided to do some good old-fashioned journalism and find out just how they were going to survive on the wages of the unskilled--at $6 to $7 an hour, only half of what is considered a living wage. So she did what millions of Americans do, she looked for a job and a place to live, worked that job, and tried to make ends meet.
As a waitress in Florida, where her name is suddenly transposed to "girl," trailer trash becomes a demographic category to aspire to with rent at $675 per month. In Maine, where she ends up working as both a cleaning woman and a nursing home assistant, she must first fill out endless pre-employment tests with trick questions such as "Some people work better when they're a little bit high." In Minnesota, she works at Wal-Mart under the repressive surveillance of men and women whose job it is to monitor her behavior for signs of sloth, theft, drug abuse, or worse. She even gets to experience the humiliation of the urine test.
So, do the poor have survival strategies unknown to the middle class? And did Ehrenreich feel the "bracing psychological effects of getting out of the house, as promised by the wonks who brought us welfare reform?" Nah. Even in her best-case scenario, with all the advantages of education, health, a car, and money for first month's rent, she has to work two jobs, seven days a week, and still almost winds up in a shelter. As Ehrenreich points out with her potent combination of humor and outrage, the laws of supply and demand have been reversed. Rental prices skyrocket, but wages never rise. Rather, jobs are so cheap as measured by the pay that workers are encouraged to take as many as they can. Behind those trademark Wal-Mart vests, it turns out, are the borderline homeless. With her characteristic wry wit and her unabashedly liberal bent, Ehrenreich brings the invisible poor out of hiding and, in the process, the world they inhabit--where civil liberties are often ignored and hard work fails to live up to its reputation as the ticket out of poverty. --Lesley Reed
Book Description
Millions of Americans work for poverty-level wages, and one day Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that any job equals a better life. But how can anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 to $7 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, taking the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart salesperson. She soon discovered that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and physical efforts. And one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors.Nickel and Dimed reveals low-wage America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generositya land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate strategies for survival. Instantly acclaimed for its insight, humor, and passion, this book is changing the way America perceives its working poor.
Customer Reviews:
Should be required reading!.......2007-10-19
Excellent book! It gives a voice to many Americans who currently are not being heard - the working poor. Should be required reading for everyone.
interesting perspective.......2007-10-17
I read this years ago but came across it again while packing. I have an awful memory but for some reason this book has stayed with me. I work and go to school so reading about her experiences with being a server and cleaning brought back memories (not good ones). I enjoyed reading about her struggles on getting by and having to deal with her family while she was away. She is a journalist so that had made me feel like jumping into that career even more so at the time. I do however feel like she cheated during her "investigation," because she had ran out of money or needed something from her "previous" life. I must also add that she made good points about working for certain big companies and how corporate places treat their employees. I don't know if her book would pertain to how things are today but I'm sure some things never change.
A Necessary Read.......2007-10-14
Some Amazon Online customers disagree with my fondness for Nickel and Dimed. Various readers consider the author to be elitist and sheltered. These people consider comments such as, "I am, of course, very different from the people who normally fill America's least attractive jobs," to be arrogant. However, these comments can also be interpreted as Ehrenreich's admittance of her obvious differences from most low-wage workers, as well as her ability to give credit to her newfound co-workers. This reader goes on to criticize the author's choice of locations; Florida and Maine especially, because as he claimed, they will always be more expensive than most places. This is not necessarily factual. It will always be difficult- virtually impossible- to squeak by when earning $2.73 per hour plus tips at a low-traffic restaurant. This is inevitable whether the restaurant is in Key West, Florida (a supposedly "rich" city) or a rural area, where the cost of living will require other fees. Yet another complaint from this reader is that Ehrenreich is racist in her statement, "My worry that the Latinos might be hogging all the crap jobs and substandard housing for themselves." On the surface, this comment absolutely sounds racist. Throughout the entire book, though, Ehrenreich systemically drops these types of comments with the intention of a) being sarcastic and b) exemplifying how easy it is to develop stereotypes of people (i.e. oppressing others) when you, yourself, are oppressed. As seen, the author cannot be blamed for these particular wrongdoings.
An Important Read.......2007-10-09
For anyone who did not have to struggle through a minimum wage job as an adult, this book is for you. Way too many Americans think people can survive on minimum wage. This will humble that opinion and identify your misconceptions.
Good read.......2007-10-05
I had to read this book for class and i must say it was a good read. extremely easy to read and equally funny.
Customer Reviews:
Everyone should read this........2006-03-14
It should be noted that this book is not, nor does it claim to be, a definitive and expansive report on the plight of the working poor. It functions as a personal memoir and a slice-of-life, an undercover view of a life that is intentionally made invisible to most members of the middle-to-upper classes.
And the view it offers is harrowing.
Ehrenreich allows herself a safety net not available to many of the places she lives among, including a car and a way out if things become threatening to her basic safety. That despite these allowances she finds it difficult to survive causes one to truly wonder about those who, for example, have to rely on systems of public transportation.
Her co-workers live in hotels and trailers, unable to make the first and last month plus deposit that would allow them to move into more cost-efficient, safe, and comfortable housing on their hand-to-mouth wages. This effects everything else in their lives: how close they are able to live to their workplaces is dictated by economy, which in turn effects the time and cost of their commute and how much sleep they can often expect to get in a night. The lack of a stove or refrigerator means they lack nutritious food and are forced to live on overpriced fast foods and processed foods, often on the edge of starvation.
Yes, Ehrenreich is an educated liberal. No, she doesn't miraculously come up with easy solutions. Given the material, she shouldn't have to apologize to anyone with a conservative bias for either of these facts. The information she gives has not been covered at this level and in this detail anywhere else, and that alone is commendable. "Nickel & Dimed" allows the realities of the invisible people who handle our food, clean our homes, and ring up our purchases to be brought to the attention of those who might want to look away.
IDEOLOGICALLY BIASED ACCOUNT..........2005-08-06
This is a well-written, interesting, anecdotal book about a well-educated woman's sojourn among the working poor. If only the author had stopped there, the book still would have been a hit. Instead, the author chose to claim it to be representative undercover reportage. Unfortunately, she does not do this with any objectivity, as she views all that she does through liberal, rose colored glasses. Nor does she live as the truly working poor do, as her existence is isolated, cut off from all support systems. While the author received raves from the New York Times Book Review, which acclaimed the author as "...the premier reporter of the underside of capitalism", the reader should remember that the New York Times is the bastion of East Coast liberalism and take such praise with a grain of salt.
The author comes across as a somewhat vapid individual, whose inherent biases and expectations prevent her from being able to live as a true member of the working poor or interact with them on a truly human level. She objects to having to take drug tests in order to secure a minimum wage position, stating that the costs of such a test outweigh the benefits, without any clear understanding, other than the cost of the drug test itself, of what the potential costs of employing substance abusers would be. She authoritatively uses statistics willy-nilly without grounding them in an appropriate context. The author does, however, establish one very important key point that would certainly tend to keep the working poor running in place, and that has to do with the cost of housing. The book leaves little doubt that there needs to be more affordable housing for the working poor. Yet, the author offers no suggestions as to how that would best be accomplished.
Moreover, the author, during her work as a cleaner for a cleaning service company, seems to have a lot of negative things to say about people who have had some demonstrable achievements in life. The author seems to forget that in almost every chapter she does not hesitate to remind the reader that she holds a Ph.D, is middle class, educated, yada, yada, yada. The one positive thing that comes out of her experience as a cleaner is that she points out that some cleaning service companies are doing a pretty filthy job of cleaning people's homes. Thanks, Barbara, for the tip, as I would now never consider using such, preferring to do it myself. Unfortunately, her remarks just might cause some of these companies to lose business, causing them to cut back on personnel, the very working poor of whom the author writes.
While the book is interesting at times, the pretentiousness of the author is generally grating and the books ends up being a poor execution of its promise. The author is the quintessential do-gooder, placed in settings of which she has little understanding other than her own pre-conceived, ideologically based ones. It is true that minimum wage will never allow anyone to flourish without some sort of support system in place. Minimum wage is nothing more than what its name states it is. Minimum wage, however, allows the unskilled, minimally experienced worker to get some job experience and a proven track record in terms of the work world. Moreover, some of the problems that the author mentions are just those of bad management by those in positions of power. This is not, however, a situation relegated to those who hold minimum wage jobs. Corporate America is rife with bad management and bosses that treat their employees, even well-compensated ones, badly.
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Nickel and Dimed 7d
Barbara Ehrendreich
Manufacturer: Recorded Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio CD
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Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
ASIN: 1419346997 |
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- From the perspective of a tourist
- ON THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN...
|
Por Cuatro Duros/nickel And Dimed: Como (No) Apanarselas En Estados Unidos
Barbara Ehrenreich
Manufacturer: Rba Publicaciones Editores Revistas
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 8479019506 |
Customer Reviews:
From the perspective of a tourist.......2007-01-16
Nickeled and Dimed has an interesting premise: an upper middle class woman tries to live on wages of an unskilled jobs in three different locations in the US. Here Ehrenreich describes her experiences doing just that and tries to relate these experiences to a larger frame of reference by laying out statistics about the US.
From having done this and that over the summers while in college and having spent the past year earning 3.85/hour plus room and board I can sort of compare my experiences in accessing Ehrenreich's book. Two things that made Ehrenreich's experiences harder than they probably would be for a person who was living the life that she was trying to visit are that she moved around frequently and she wasn't as frugal a shopper as she could have been. The moving around means that she was always starting fresh. From my experience after about 2 months in a city I know where to go for this and that and my expenses drop. Also she wasn't the most frugal person. When she had to get khaki pants on short notice for a waitressing job, she spent 40$ on pants with a stain from a discount store. In Florida (the same state) at about the same time I had to get khaki pants on short notice and found them for 15$. I'm kind if fat and so there was less of a selection for me than for someone in a more common size. I doubt that normal people in such jobs would spend 40$ on pants. 15$ felt like alot to me. From Ehrenreich's description she didn't bat an eye at 40$
Ehrenrich's descriptions of co-worker's plights are more realistic. While it isn't so hard to get by at poverty level (unless you get sick like missing work sick) I have trouble imagining how to raise a family on minimum wage. Descriptions of co-workers whose food budget was tiny are common. I kind of wonder how these people felt about being quizzed. I feel that there was too much focus on rent and food. These are big expenses but they are predictable. Once one finds a way to make ends meet that's stable at least.
One aspect of being poor that I feel was neglected was the lack of medical care. Insurance coverage is expensive and if it doesn't come with the job then that is a big budgeting item. Also jobs without benefits are the one that pay less. Also the difficulty in getting sit down work if one gets injured is a huge issue. Ehrenreich kind of touches on these with statistics and concern for a co-worker with a sprained ankle respectively, but she spends most of her time discussing how the nations poor can't buy food or make rent and trying to make poverty an immediate life or death issue. For me poverty is about not having a safety net.
When I was working for 3.85 and room and board (no benefits at all) I had a co-worker with higher pay use this book to explain how easy I had it. At the time I was trying to scrape together enough for a dental visit and pay some work related expenses. (I had switched jobs and underestimated the fees for work related training and equipment.) She was angry that I was having trouble getting cash together because that reflected badly on the company. Which brings me to a point: Everyday you are in contact with someone who is living at poverty level. Because they shower and know how to get by you may not realize this. The starving limping people Ehrenreich describes aren't common, but that shouldn't be used to undercut the problems faced by poor people who are not in an emergency state right now. It seems to me that many of the people I know who have read this book have strange ideas about the poor to begin with. So if you haven't been poor for a while then don't make this your only source for info about it.
I reccommend Nikeled and Dimed, but take it with a grain of salt. Ehrenreich is a tourist of poverty and has a shallow impression not a deep understanding of the issues.
ON THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN..........2006-06-04
This ithe Spanish text edition of "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America", a well-written, interesting, anecdotal book about a well-educated woman's sojourn among the working poor. If only the author had stopped there, the book still would have been a hit. Instead, the author chose to claim it to be representative undercover reportage. Unfortunately, she does not do this with any objectivity, as she views all that she does through liberal, rose colored glasses. Nor does she live as the truly working poor do, as her existence is isolated, cut off from all support systems. While the author received raves from the New York Times Book Review, which acclaimed the author as "...the premier reporter of the underside of capitalism", the reader should remember that the New York Times is the bastion of East Coast liberalism, and take such praise with a grain of salt.
The author comes across as a somewhat vapid individual, whose inherent biases and expectations prevent her from being able to live as a true member of the working poor or interact with them on a truly human level. She objects to having to take drug tests in order to secure a minimum wage position, stating that the costs of such a test outweigh the benefits, without any clear understanding, other than the cost of the drug test itself, of what the potential costs of employing substance abusers would be. She authoritatively uses statistics willy-nilly without grounding them in an appropriate context. The author does, however, establish one very important key point that would certainly tend to keep the working poor running in place, and that has to do with the cost of housing. The book leaves little doubt that there needs to be more affordable housing for the working poor. Yet, the author offers no suggestions as to how that would best be accomplished.
Moreover, the author, during her work as a cleaner for a cleaning service company, seems to have a lot of negative things to say about people who have had some demonstrable achievements in life. The author seems to forget that in almost every chapter she does not hesitate to remind the reader that she holds a Ph.D, is middle class, educated, yada, yada, yada. The one positive thing that comes out of her experience as a cleaner is that she points out that some cleaning service companies are doing a pretty filthy job of cleaning people's homes. Thanks, Barbara, for the tip, as I would now never consider using such, preferring to do it myself. Unfortunately, her remarks just might cause some of these companies to lose business, causing them to cut back on personnel, the very working poor of whom the author writes.
While the book is interesting at times, the pretentiousness of the author is generally grating and the books ends up being a poor execution of its promise. The author is the quintessential do-gooder, placed in settings of which she has little understanding other than her own pre-conceived, ideologically based ones. It is true that minimum wage will never allow anyone to flourish without some sort of support system in place. Minimum wage is nothing more than what its name states it is. Minimum wage, however, allows the unskilled, minimally experienced worker to get some job experience and a proven track record in terms of the work world. Moreover, some of the problems that the author mentions are just those of bad management by those in positions of power. This is not, however, a situation relegated to those who hold minimum wage jobs. Corporate America is rife with bad management and bosses that treat their employees, even well-compensated ones, badly.
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