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    This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation
    This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation
    This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation
    Audiobook5 hours

    This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation

    Written by Barbara Ehrenreich

    Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Barbara Ehrenreich's first book of satirical commentary, The Worst Years of Our Lives, which was 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJul 8, 2008
    ISBN9781400177738
    Author

    Barbara Ehrenreich

    Barbara Ehrenreich (1941-2022) was a bestselling author and political activist, whose more than a dozen books included Nickel and Dimed, which the New York Times described as "a classic in social justice literature", Bait and Switch, Bright-sided, This Land Is Their Land, Dancing In the Streets, and Blood Rites. An award-winning journalist, she frequently contributed to Harper's, The Nation, The New York Times, and TIME magazine. Ehrenreich was born in Butte, Montana, when it was still a bustling mining town. She studied physics at Reed College, and earned a Ph.D. in cell biology from Rockefeller University. Rather than going into laboratory work, she got involved in activism, and soon devoted herself to writing her innovative journalism.

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    Reviews for This Land Is Their Land

    3.5/5

    131 ratings13 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Absolutely great choice of repartee-loaded essays on American reality. Definitely recommended.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Ehrenreich is an excellent writer: persuasive, entertaining, and informative. At times, her generalizations are overstatements (e.g., "no one under 50 wants to live in a gated community"), to the point of undermining her overarching arguments.
    • 4/5
      I happen to agree with Ms. Ehrenreich on 99% of points, but her writing style at times rubbed me the wrong way, especially when she was deriding people for believing in God. I am sure a lot of the incendiary comments were there just to annoy conservatives, but it distracted from my enjoyment of the book.5 stars for content, 2 stars for writing style.
    • 2/5
      The author got a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong. Where she was right, she was sickeningly smug and where she was wrong was downright sickening. I didn't appreciate the Michael Moorean approach of presenting facts that agree with you and supressing ones that don't. Also, it was not pleasant to sit through hours of tedious pessimism only to end the book with no real positive solutions.
    • 3/5
      This starts out interesting, but ends tired and maybe even a little trite. Overall, I felt like I was re-reading other books by Ehrenreich. Still, I do enjoy her dry, and times dark, wit.
    • 5/5
      I really enjoyed this because it made me think and it made me upset. I want to show this book to our social studies teacher and have him read it, and think about if the 8th graders could possibly work on a social justice/community service project stemming from one of the essays in the book. Since the book's essays cover a wide range of topics that affect them directly, like health care, sex education, _regular_ public school education, growing poverty -- I think it would be important for them as future citizens to learn about something and research ideas to make things better (or at least draw more attention to something that everyone should know but doesn't).
    • 4/5
      This book was published in 2008, but with the Occupy Wall Street movement garnering national attention, now seemed like the ideal time for me to finally get around to reading it. Ehrenreich has a lot to say about the widening gap between the ultra-rich and the rest of us, the difficulties involved in being poor in America (including the problem of health care), and the abuses corporations get away with heaping on their employees. She also talks a bit, towards the end, about issues such as gay marriage, abortion, and the cultural mindset that gives us such self-deluding self-help principles as "the Secret."Each chapter here is only three or four pages long, delivering a small, pointed little nugget of social criticism. I believe all or most of these were originally published elsewhere, although it would have been good for that to have been stated in the introduction, since it feels oddly structured if you try to approach it as a unified work: a little disjointed, occasionally slightly repetitive, and prone to rely more on anecdote than on deep analysis. Ehrenreich's often-satirical writing is very sharp, though, sometimes blisteringly so, and the problems she's addressing are important and very real. In the end, it isn't terribly cohesive, but it does manage to be simultaneously entertaining and rather depressing to read.
    • 3/5
      This is a collection of short essays, opinion pieces really, written by Barbara Ehrenreich. They mostly touch on topics related to the working class and poor and their challenges with work and family. It's a little dated. It was published in 2009, and obviously written before the bulk of the current economic crisis hit. It would be interesting to hear what she has to say about the crisis and its effect on the same people she is writing about now. The author has a great sense of humor, and really sticks it to Bush & co. though sometimes her positions are a bit extreme.
    • 5/5
      Easy to read and appropriately sarcastic skewering of the right
    • 3/5
      I like Barbara’s books, but she, an extreme liberal, does exactly what the extreme conservatives do: She tells little scary stories out of context to promote her own agenda. Is our land really such a scary and terrible place? I don’t think so. What are her suggestions for making things better? She rarely proposes solutions, and, if she does, they are generally a single sentence at the end of her diatribe. Is it useful for people to read books like this? Not if it hardens us to the world and makes dialogue with others more difficult, I think.
    • 4/5
      A collection of her recent columns, with the weakness of that genre - the essays are not as topical as they were when they were first printed.Still, an important voice, saying things that need saying.
    • 3/5
      Ehrenreich, author of many undercover journalistic books, hits at the government and the country in general in her essays which widely range from immigration to health care. All of her essays give the strong message that in this country, we are divided into a nation of haves and have nots, a sad testament to what America should be about. I love Ehrenreich's sharp, funny writing style, and I really was hoping this would be another one of her undercover-writer books. Alas, this book is composed of several small magazine and newspaper op\ed pieces which is obviously her opinion. In her essays, all Republicans, led by the evil president, are evil fat cats that only care about making more money, and the Democrats suffer endlessly to help the homeless, poor and despondent of the nation. Regardless of whether or not you share Ehrenreich's views, her writing style makes the essays fun to read, even if they are a little biased.
    • 4/5
      Startling statistics and stories that shouldn't surprise anyone who's paying attention to what's happening in America now. It was interesting to read while watching the presidential party conventions. The author did a great job of inserting levity and illustrations of strength of spirit while telling this depressing story. I keep quoting it.