Your experience of this book will depend almost entirely on whether or not you already find Barbara Ehrenreich witty and insightful and fascinating. I do, so I enjoyed this collection of brief observations, but it would not have converted me if I had come to it as an Ehrenreich skeptic. The basic theme holding the book together is something like, "Life is really hard in the U.S. in the first decade of the new millenium," and Ehrenreich casts a wide net as she mocks big business, the health care system, the higher education system, megachurch pastors, and opponents of issues like gay marriage and abortion. She maintains a consistently humorous tone to take the edge off of her fury, but she never backs down from calling attention to abuses when she sees them. The short essays have a nice variety when it comes to tone, as they range from a satirical "welcome to college" speech to show what would happen if schools really told the truth about the way they will introduce students to debt, to a very personal summary of two abortions the author has had, to a quick exploration of the societal implications of a news story of a man committing a crime and asking to be sentenced just long enough to begin receiving social security.

The main problem with this book is that it is almost entirely observational, with short essays that don't go deep enough for persuasion if a reader isn't already inclined to agree with Ehrenreich's point, and almost no suggestions for real solutions to problems (although one can piece together that, for example, Ehrenreich favors a single-payer health care system from the way she mocks opponents of such a system). I would never recommend this book for a political conservative, even though I think someone of any political background could appreciate the humanity of Ehrenreich's most popular works (Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch).