This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation by Barbara Ehrenreich

The Barnes & Noble Review

In her 1990 essay collection, The Worst Years of Our Lives, social critic Barbara Ehrenreich took aim at all those deliciously deserving ‘80s punch lines -- yuppies, lecherous televangelists, Dan Quayle -- while also presenting an impassioned critique of the decade’s rising greed and injustice. Little did she know then that things had yet to bottom out.

Ehrenreich has another collection of satirical essays, and while the title is This Land Is Their Land, it could well have been The New Worst Years of Our Lives. Covering the first decade of the 21st century, the roughly 60 short pieces, which originally appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, andThe Progressive, are vintage Ehrenreich: sharp, scathing, rousing, and very funny -- although in many cases the humor is of the laugh-to-keep-from-crying variety.

Her broader argument is laid out in an introduction that recalls the brief "spasm of unity" that followed 9/11 but then identifies the real enemy threatening the United States:

Whatever resonated with us about the idea of a "homeland" and "one nation, indivisible" was being quietly undercut by a force more powerful than terrorism, more divisive than treason. In a process that had begun in the 1980s and suddenly accelerated in the early 2000s, the ground was shifting under our feet, recarving the American landscape. The peaks of great wealth grew higher, rising up beyond the clouds, while the valleys of poverty sank lower into perpetual shadow. The once broad plateau of the middle class eroded away into a narrow ledge, with the white-knuckled occupants holding on for dear life.

If that overview sounds a little too passive-voiced for you, worry not: Ehrenreich proceeds to name names. In sections with titles like "Chasms of Inequality," "Meanness on the Rise," "Strangling the Middle Class," and "Hell Day at Work," the author skewers the Bush administration (natch), corporate CEOs, the health insurance industry, and the superrich, among others, with vigorous fury.

"Circuit City CEO Philip J. Schoonover is assured of getting a warm welcome in hell," begins one essay, written after the electronics chain laid off 3,400 longtime employees in order to replace them with less experienced workers coming in at a lower wage. The same piece goes after New York Times economics columnist David Leonhardt for opining that such corporate moves might be necessary to prevent recession. Of Jason Furman, a liberal economist quoted in Leonhardt’s column who sees mass layoffs as part of the "flexibility of the American labor force," she writes, "It’s fellows like Furman who put the ‘ick’ in the word Democratic." Here, as in many of the essays, Ehrenreich insistently gives voice to the moral component of dispassionate news stories about abstractions like "the market."

She likes to dig beneath tossed-around slogans, too. Take "support our troops." In "The Cheapskate Warfare State" Ehrenreich describes the difficult financial realities faced by many military families -- front-line battle troops earn a paltry $17,000 a year -- and the way that recent economic policy affects them. "When the Bush administration, in its frenzied rush to transfer more wealth to the already wealthy, hurts the working poor, you can count the troops among them," she writes, deftly measuring the administration’s rhetoric against its policy.

The flip side of her withering scorn is Ehrenreich’s compassion for society’s underdogs, honed, no doubt, while doing undercover reporting on the working poor for her 2001 bestseller, Nickel and Dimed. This collection is particularly strong on illegal immigrants and the uninsured. "There may be reasonable arguments for limiting immigration, but it wasn’t a Mexican who took away your pension or sold you on a dodgy mortgage," she observes in an effort to redirect American rage toward more appropriate targets.

She also points out the increasingly disturbing extremes in American society, pairing ballooning pay for CEOs (she cites departing Home Depot chief Robert Nardelli, who was given $210 million just to go away) with the bizarre cases of forced servitude recently prosecuted in the U.S., including a wealthy Long Island couple charged with keeping two Indonesian women as slaves for five years. "If the new ‘top’ involves pay in the tens or hundreds of millions, a private jet, and a few acres of Nantucket, the new bottom is slavery," she notes. Elsewhere, she juxtaposes the rise in sophisticated health care treatments for pets (including dialysis, MRIs, and chemotherapy) with the rise in the number of uninsured American children. Here she cites the well-publicized case of a 12-year-old uninsured boy who died from an infection brought on by an abscessed tooth. "Could a vet have handled this problem? Yes, absolutely," she writes drily, suggesting the poor seek less costly pet insurance for their children.

The format here doesn’t showcase the narrative journalism skills that Ehrenreich deployed to such effect in Nickel and Dimed. These are tightly crafted pieces, and they pack more punch when read in short bursts than in long stretches. But any one of them is likely to include incisive analysis and produce rueful laughter. An essay mocking abstinence education mentions that it has been subsidized by the federal government "since President Clinton signed the welfare reform bill of 1996, which provided abstinence training for impoverished women (though not, alas, for him)."

Despite her humor, one gets the sense that Ehrenreich’s patience is flagging. "How many ‘wake-up’ calls, do we need, people?" she asks. "How many broken levees, drowned cities, depleted food pantries, people dead for lack of ordinary health care?" And elsewhere: "Why are American students sucking their thumbs while the Bush administration proposes a $12.7 billion cut in student loans? Where is the outrage over the massive layoffs at Ford, Hewlett-Packard, and dozens of other major companies?"

For most readers, this book will provoke some form of outrage. If you’re part of the choir Ehrenreich is preaching to, there will be plenty here to rile you up, whether it’s her stinging take on decreased social spending, increased outsourcing, or profit-driven health care. But if you sit on the other side of the aisle from this self-described Democratic Socialist, you might agree with New York Times columnist David Brooks, who, Ehrenreich reveals in one essay, "has chided [her] personally for taking 'an overly negative view of reality.' " The latter group may shudder at the author’s ultimate prescription for our nation’s ills: "We’ll need a new deal, a new distribution of power and wealth, if we want to restore the beautiful idea that was 'America.' " --Barbara Spindel

Barbara Spindel has covered books for Time Out New York, Newsweek.com, Details, and Spin. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies.

From the Publisher

America in the ’aughts—hilariously skewered, brilliantly dissected, and darkly diagnosed by one of the country’s most prominent social critics

Now in paperback, Barbara Ehrenreich’s widely acclaimed This Land Is Their Land takes the measure of what we are left with after the cruelest decade in memory and finds lurid extremes all around. While members of the moneyed elite have bought up 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 Masters of the Universe have thrown themselves into the casino economy, the less fortunate have been fed a diet of morality, marriage, and abstinence. With perfect satiric pitch, Ehrenreich reveals a country scarred by deepening inequality, corroded by distrust, and shamed by its official cruelty.

Full of wit and generosity, these reports from a divided nation—including new and unpublished essays—confirm once again that Ehrenreich is, as the San Francisco Chronicle proclaims, “essential reading.”

The New York Times - Richard Eder

…the best of the pieces are something quite different from journalism. They are small absurdist gems. Ms. Ehrenreich will take a familiar social or cultural inequity, and then take it too far, and then take it so far that it metamorphoses into a disbelieving belief. If she often resembles Mr. Dooley drawling out a newspaper item and giving it a sardonic jab, there are times she is closer to Dean Swift with his Modest Proposal to alleviate starvation by cooking and eating babies. No, we flinch; and a moment later, yes, by God.

Publishers Weekly

Ehrenreich's vicious, hilarious and striking tour de force of American culture and society today addresses a range of issues from class warfare to health care, higher education to feminism to religious institutionalization and political power. She weighs in with wit, clarity and authority that few authors can match. Loosely knitted together, this collection of essays paints a disappointing picture of the world today. Cassandra Campbell works well with Ehrenreich's prose. She's keen at picking up Ehrenreich's wit and smoothly delivers punch lines. Campbell's inflections are also particularly strong, especially when Ehrenreich is driving home a point or taking a shot at someone or something. Campbell's light and crisp tone is a perfect match for Ehrenreich's demeanor and textual tone. A Metropolitan hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 24). (July)

Jill Ortner - Library Journal

Ehrenreich (Bait and Switch; Nickel and Dimed) laments, "I flinch when I hear Woody Guthrie's line 'This land belongs to you and me.' Somehow I don't think it was meant to be sung by a chorus of hedge fund operators." In this collection of essays and commentaries on the U.S. economic and social divide-turned-chasm, she looks at a wide range of topics including extravagant corporate CEO bailouts, pharmaceutical companies' recruitment of college cheerleaders as sales reps, and xenophobic children living in gated communities. Readers of her previous books will not be surprised that Wal-Mart and the private health insurance industry are frequent targets of her acerbic wit. In Swiftian style, Ehrenreich suggests that families unable to obtain health-care coverage for their children should buy pet health insurance for them, and she blithely maintains that employers have cut wages and benefits to such levels that it is safe to assume employees will soon be asked to pay their boss for the privilege of working. In a droll postscript, she invites readers to visit a web site where they can be matched up with a new country appropriate to their tastes and values since nationality is one of the "few things that can be changed without surgery." Recommended for public libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

A collection of fierce polemics on the sorry state of American society from social critic, essayist and journalist Ehrenreich (Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, 2007, etc.). The author sees the United States as increasingly polarized into the self-indulgent superrich and the downtrodden poor, with a shrinking middle class in between. As in Nickel and Dimed (2001), she writes vividly about the plight of those struggling to make ends meet with minimum-wage jobs, and her wrath is directed at those she sees as their oppressors: the financial industry, the private health-insurance industry, medical professionals, airlines, oil companies and big-box stores-especially Wal-Mart, though Target is a target too. Ehrenreich harbors a special scorn for the lifestyle of mega-wealthy hedge-fund managers, but others who wear the black hat are President Bush, CEOs and college administrators. She lays herself open to charges of oversimplification on economic issues, but her journalistic instincts generally serve her well. Her witty, quite brief chapters, some only two or three pages long, are organized into themed sections with such charged titles as "Meanness on the Rise" and "Hell Day at Work." While some of the pieces in this collection were originally written for the New York Times, The Progressive and other publications, most previously appeared in slightly different form as blogs on the author's website. Blogs, however, are time-sensitive and intended to be stand-alones. Read in succession as chapters of a book, they seem scattershot, and some pieces are dated-for example, Ehrenreich's comments about President Bush's health savings account idea and her spiteful piece on thehigh-earning devotees of low-fat diets. Provocative, angry and funny, often at the same time-just don't try to read it all in one sitting.

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