Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. Leaving her home, she took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity? exposing the darker side of American prosperity and the true cost of the American dream.

Bombarded by pink ribbons and platitudes following a breast cancer diagnosis, Ehrenreich was shocked to find that her anger was seen as unhealthy and dangerous by health professionals and other professionals. From health to academia, the economy to Iraq, Ehrenreich exposes a trail of denial, delusion, and bad faith, and reveals the often disastrous consequences of putting on 'a happy face'. Rigorous, insightful and also incredibly funny, Smile or Die is a sharp-witted knockdown of America's love affair with positive thinking.

In Dancing in the Streets Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. She discovers that the same elements come up in every human culture throughout history: a love of masking, carnival, music-making and dance. Although sixteenth-century Europeans began to view mass festivities as foreign and 'savage', Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greek's worship of Dionysus to the medieval practices of Christianity as a 'danced religion'. Exhilarating in its scholarly range, humane, witty and impassioned, Dancing in the Streets will generate debate and soul-searching.

We tend to believe we have agency over our bodies, our minds and even our deaths. Yet emerging science challenges our assumptions of mastery: at the microscopic level, the cells in our bodies facilitate tumours and attack other cells, with life-threatening consequences. In this revelatory book, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that our bodies are a battleground over which we have little control, and lays bare the cultural charades that shield us from this knowledge. Challenging everything we think we know about life and death, she also offers hope - that we find our place in a natural world teeming with animation and endless possibility.

A self-proclaimed 'myth buster by trade', over her long-ranging career as a journalist and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich has delved with devastating wit and insight into the social and political fabric of America. Had I Known gathers together Ehrenreich's most significant articles and excerpts from the last four decades - some of which became the starting point for her bestselling books - from her award-winning article 'Welcome to Cancerland', published shortly after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, to her groundbreaking investigative journalism in 'Nickel and Dimed', which explored living in America on the minimum wage. Issues she identified as far back as the 80s and 90s such as work poverty, rising inequality, the gender divide and medicalised health care, are top of the social and political agenda today. Written with remarkable tenderness, humour and incisiveness, Ehrenreich's describes an America of struggle, inequality, racial bias and injustice. Her extraordinarily prescient and relevant perspective announces her as one of most significant thinkers of our day.

Middle class executives are the people who've done everything right - gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills and build up impressive resumes - yet they have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster. In Bait and Switch, Ehrenreich enters a shadowy world of Internet job searches, lonely networking events and costly career-coaching sessions, a world in which 'professional' mentors and trainers offer pop-psychology and self-help mantras to desperate would-be employees. Poignant and blackly funny, Bait and Switch delivers a stark warning about the future that faces corporate employees everywhere and calls for collective action to guard against it.

"Fascinating . . . An admirably lucid, level-headed history of outbreaks of joy from Dionysus to the Grateful Dead."--Terry Eagleton, "The Nation""" Widely praised as "impressive" (The Washington Post Book World), "ambitious" (The Wall Street Journal), and "alluring" (The Los Angeles Times), Dancing in the Streets explores a human impulse that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the desire for collective joy, historically expressed in revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing.
Drawing on a wealth of history and anthropology, Barbara Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. From the earliest orgiastic Mesopotamian rites to the medieval practice of Christianity as a "danced religion" and the transgressive freedoms of carnival, she demonstrates that mass festivities have long been central to the Western tradition. In recent centuries, this festive tradition has been repressed, cruelly and often bloodily. But as Ehrenreich argues in this original, exhilarating, and ultimately optimistic book, the celebratory impulse is too deeply ingrained in human nature ever to be completely extinguished.

Barbara Ehrenreich is an acclaimed social critic on both sides of the Atlantic, renowned for her trenchant, witty polemics, her pieces of journalism, and her trademark intelligence. She writes with unparalleled precision, insight and a rationalist's unwavering gaze. But in middle age, she rediscovered the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence, which records an event so strange that she had never, in all the intervening years, written or spoken about it. It was the kind of event that people call a 'mystical experience' - and to a steadfast atheist and rationalist, was nothing less than shattering. In Living with a Wild God, Ehrenreich vividly explores her life-long quest to find 'the truth' about the universe and everything else, in an attempt to reconcile this cataclysmic, defining moment with her secular understanding of the world. The result is a profound reflection on science, religion and the human condition, and a personal insight into the inner life of one of our finest thinkers. It is a book that challenges us all to reassess our perceptions of the world and what it means to be alive.

Intrigued by reports of increasing poverty and despair within America's white-collar corporate workforce, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to infiltrate their world as an undercover reporter and learn about the problems facing middle-class executives at first hand. Thinking she had set herself an easy challenge, the author was quite unprepared for what happened next. Ehrenreich found herself entering a shadowy world of Internet job searches, lonely networking events and costly career-coaching sessions, a world in which 'professional' mentors and trainers offer pop-psychology and self-help mantras to desperate would-be employees. Her story is an important one - poignant and blackly funny - that delivers a stark warning about the future that faces corporate employees everywhere and calls for collective action to guard against it.

This anthology examines the unexplored consequences of globalization on the lives of women worldwide. In a world shaped by mass migration and economic exchange on an ever-increasing scale, women are moving around the globe as never before. Every year, millions leave Mexico, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Eastern Europe to work in the homes, nurseries and brothels of the First World - from Vietnamese mail-order brides to Mexican nannies in LA, from Thai girls in Vietnamese brothels to Czech au pairs in the UK. In the new global calculus, the female energy that flows to wealthy countries to ease a 'care deficit' is subtracted from poor ones, often to the detriment of the families left behind. Is the main resource now extracted from the Third World no longer gold or silver, but love?

An ALA Notable Book
A New York Times Notable Book
In Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich confronts the mystery of the human attraction to violence: What draws our species to war and even makes us see it as a kind of sacred undertaking? Blood Rites takes us on an original journey from the elaborate human sacrifices of the ancient world to the carnage and holocaust of twentieth-century "total war." Sifting through the fragile records of prehistory, Ehrenreich discovers the wellspring of war in an unexpected place--not in a "killer instinct" unique to the males of our species but in the blood rites early humans performed to reenact their terrifying experience of predation by stronger carnivores. Brilliant in conception, rich in scope, Blood Rites is a monumental work that will transform our understanding of the greatest single threat to human life.

America is a grotesquely polarized society and becoming more so all the time. In this razor-sharp, funny and terrifying collection of pieces, Barbara Ehrenreich shows how the widening gap between rich and poor over the past eight years has left the country increasingly divided between the gated communities on the one hand and the trailer parks and tenements on the other. She describes a country where the super-rich travel by private jet, while low-paid workers make multiple bus trips to get to their jobs; where a wealthy minority obsessively consumes cosmetic surgery, while the poor often go without basic health care for their children; where members of the moneyed elite can buy congressmen, while a troubling proportion of the working class can barely buy lunch. Ehrenreich writes corruscatingly about the pay of CEOs, the treatment of illegal immigrants, the way Wal-Mart spies on and interrogates its employees, and the fact that in the US it's easier to get health insurance for a pet than for a child. Going to Extremes brilliantly anatomizes pre-Obama America: a nation scarred by deepening equality and corroded by distrust.

Moral Soundings takes a fresh new approach to introducing students and general readers to contemporary ethics. Rather than surveying the standard fare in a typical anthology format, Furrow collects diversified essays around a structured theme: does Western culture face a moral crisis of values? Prominent voices in the humanities and social sciences provide a range of perspectives on a concentrated set of ethical questions dealing with such topics as family values, the morality of capitalism, the benefits and dangers of new technologies, global conflict, and the role of religion. Unlike point/counterpoint books that often oversimplify the complexity of ethical questions, the readings in Moral Soundings provoke critical engagement and help students to recognize and emulate the logical development of arguments-all in engaging and easily accessible language. Readings are supplemented with helpful chapter introductions, study questions, and strategically placed editorial commentary to encourage further discussion and reflection. These features make Moral Soundings an ideal primary or supplementary text for undergraduate courses in ethics, contemporary moral issues, and social and political philosophy.

Moral Soundings takes a fresh new approach to introducing students and general readers to contemporary ethics. Rather than surveying the standard fare in a typical anthology format, Furrow collects diversified essays around a structured theme: does Western culture face a moral crisis of values? Prominent voices in the humanities and social sciences provide a range of perspectives on a concentrated set of ethical questions dealing with such topics as family values, the morality of capitalism, the benefits and dangers of new technologies, global conflict, and the role of religion. Unlike point/counterpoint books that often oversimplify the complexity of ethical questions, the readings in Moral Soundings provoke critical engagement and help students to recognize and emulate the logical development of arguments-all in engaging and easily accessible language. Readings are supplemented with helpful chapter introductions, study questions, and strategically placed editorial commentary to encourage further discussion and reflection. These features make Moral Soundings an ideal primary or supplementary text for undergraduate courses in ethics, contemporary moral issues, and social and political philosophy.

A "NEW YORK TIMES" BESTSELLER
Americans are a "positive" people -- cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat: This is our reputation as well as our self-image. But more than a temperament, being positive is the key to getting success and prosperity. Or so we are told.
In this utterly original debunking, Barbara Ehrenreich confronts the false promises of positive thinking and shows its reach into every corner of American life, from Evangelical megachurches to the medical establishment, and, worst of all, to the business community, where the refusal to consider negative outcomes--like mortgage defaults--contributed directly to the current economic disaster. With the myth-busting powers for which she is acclaimed, Ehrenreich exposes the downside of positive thinking: personal self-blame and national denial. This is Ehrenreich at her provocative best--poking holes in conventional wisdom and faux science and ending with a call for existential clarity and courage.