Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America in The Dusty Bookshelf

Jun 14, 2012 Rebecca rated it liked it

Shelves: school-books, nonfiction

My feelings about this book were best summed up by Ehrenreich herself when she was watching Survivor: "Who are these nutcases who would volunteer for an artificially daunting situation in order to entertain millions of strangers with their half-assed efforts to survive? Then I remember where I am and why I am here" (160).

The book does have good moments. My favorite line in the book was from when she was attending an Evangelical prayer meeting of sorts and notes, "But Jesus makes his appearance h My feelings about this book were best summed up by Ehrenreich herself when she was watching Survivor: "Who are these nutcases who would volunteer for an artificially daunting situation in order to entertain millions of strangers with their half-assed efforts to survive? Then I remember where I am and why I am here" (160).

The book does have good moments. My favorite line in the book was from when she was attending an Evangelical prayer meeting of sorts and notes, "But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say" (68). She makes a lot of good points that some people may not be familiar with and very clearly illustrates just how hard it is to live on a minimum-wage job--and, as she pointed out, she had a lot of advantages to start with. This was a subject I was somewhat acquainted with, but her book certainly shed light on everyday occurrences that I had never even thought of.

In the end, though, the execution of both the book and the experiment itself was a little lacking. At one point she makes an analogy to "breeders and drones" (82), theorizing that a woman who dressed provocatively did so to prove that she'd overcome the limitations of being a "drone" and now just produced children as a "breeder". The parallel between workers and bees is ridiculous at best (there is exactly one bee who breeds, which is the queen; drones literally do not work a day in their lives, unless they're one of the 10 or 20 who mate with the queen and then die immediately after) and possibly insulting: the dehumanizing manner in which she portrays workers (a recurring theme in this book) is a bit weird. She worries about being thought of as a "pathetic street person" (88); she says of Alzheimer patients, "Once you join the residents in forgetting about the functioning humans they once were, you can think of them as a band of wizened toddlers at a tea party" (103). She philosophizes on her role in tidying up the women's area of Wal-Mart; she even (somewhat bizarrely) decides she could have started a union movement there. And the list goes on.

Overall, I thought this book was certainly well-intentioned, but the execution was not great. She tried to do a really interesting thing that brought to light for many people the difficulty of minimum-wage earners, but she seemed, to me, unable to fully commit to the project. She held herself apart from everyone else--though she made friends in her jobs, she wondered at how nobody guessed at how well educated she was, how different or special she was. It's not a bad book, and I think she makes good points, but every few pages or so she would say something that would give me pause.

It's an interesting book and food for thought. I will probably re-read it, but only because it was a required book for my English class; if it wasn't, I doubt I would have even finished it the first time around. ...more

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