This Land Is Their Land

By Verna Noel Jones, Special to the Rocky

Published July 3, 2008 at 6 p.m.

Text size

More Books

* Nonfiction. By Barbara Ehrenreich. Metropolitan Books, $24. Grade: C

Book in a nutshell: In her passionately written best-selling book Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich exposed the dark problems of millions of Americans who work full time at poverty-level wages. She fused her own firsthand experiences into the book after trying out several menial jobs. In her follow-up book, Bait and Switch, she made astute observations about the struggles of well-educated, white-collar workers with equally disheartening experiences in finding jobs and keeping them.

This Land Is Their Land is painted with a much broader brush. It's a collection of wit-filled musings on all that's wrong with America, which she posits is polarized between the luxurious lives of the spoiled superrich few and the hardships of everyone else.

This compilation of essays and blog entries jumps quickly between subjects, ruminating on the woes of immigrants, college students facing massive debt, the perils of outsourcing, outrageous health-care costs, workplace dictatorships and much more.

Throughout, the former New York Times columnist and freelance contributor to Harper's, The Nation and numerous other national publications offers wry suggestions as to how we can shake up the status quo - pet insurance for your children, anyone?

Best tidbit: In her rant on private health insurance, the author notes that it appears to be designed only for people who are the least likely to get sick and that, rather than be considered insurance against illness, it should instead be called what she claims it is: extortion.

Pros: Ehrenreich's commentaries are the equivalent of a good shoulder-shaking for the collective American populace as she prompts readers to wake up and see all that's gone wrong with the country.

Cons: The book offers little that's startling or new. It's a rehash of so much that we already know about the lives of what many see as a growing underclass.

Final word: This book is a downer and lacks the freshness of thought that Ehrenreich displayed so brilliantly in previous works. It simply serves to remind people that they shouldn't look to improve their lives any time soon. And who wants to read that?

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News