Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

by Jessica Bruder

Ed and Patricia, married for more than forty years, had retired in the late 1990s from jobs as a motorcycle cop and a mail carrier.

I repeat to myself a cardinal rule of nonfiction writing: The story keeps unfolding into the future, but at some point you step away.

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops,” reflected the late writer Stephen Jay Gould.