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Reading
Together returns in 2004! The Kalamazoo community-wide selection committee
chose
Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich's acclaimed look
at the life of the working poor.
Discussion groups and special events will take place from February
23 to March 31. For information, call 553-7913.
Visit
the Kalamazoo Library's Reading Together website
 About
the Book
The New York Times bestseller, and one of the most
talked about books of the year,
Nickel and Dimed has
already become a classic of undercover reportage.
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 generosity -- a 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.
About the Author
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of
Nickel and Dimed,
Blood Rites , The Worst Years of Our Lives (a New York Times
bestseller),
Fear of Falling, which was nominated for a
National Book Critics Circle Award, and eight other books. A
frequent contributor to Time, Harper's, Esquire, The New
Republic, Mirabella, The Nation, and The New York Times
Magazine, she lives near Key West, Florida.
Above excerpts from Henry
Holt and Company
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