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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Americans are feeling insecure. They are retreating to gated
communities in record numbers, fearing for their jobs and their
401(k)s, nervous about their health insurance and their debt
levels, worrying about terrorist attacks and immigrants. In this
innovative volume, editors Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteman
gather essays from nineteen leading ethnographers to create a
unique portrait of an anxious country and to furnish valuable
insights into the nation's possible future. With an incisive
foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich, the contributors draw on their deep
knowledge of different facets of American life to map the impact of
the new economy, the "war on terror," the "war on drugs," racial
resentments, a fraying safety net, undocumented immigration, a
health care system in crisis, and much more. In laying out a range
of views on the forces that unsettle us, "The Insecure American"
demonstrates the singular power of an anthropological perspective
for grasping the impact of corporate profit on democratic life,
charting the links between policy and vulnerability, and
envisioning alternatives to life as an insecure American.
From the "New York Times" bestselling author of "Nickel and Dimed"
comes a brave, frank, and exquisitely written memoir that will
change the way you see the world. Barbara Ehrenreich is one of the
most important thinkers of our time. Educated as a scientist, she
is an author, journalist, activist, and advocate for social
justice. In LIVING WITH A WILD GOD, she recounts her
quest-beginning in childhood-to find "the Truth" about the universe
and everything else: What's really going on? Why are we here? In
middle age, she rediscovered the journal she had kept during her
tumultuous adolescence, which records an event so strange, so
cataclysmic, that she had never, in all the intervening years,
written or spoken about it to anyone. It was the kind of event that
people call a "mystical experience"-and, to a steadfast atheist and
rationalist, nothing less than shattering. In LIVING WITH A WILD
GOD, Ehrenreich reconstructs her childhood mission, bringing an
older woman's wry and erudite perspective to a young girl's
impassioned obsession with the questions that, at one point or
another, torment us all. The result is both deeply personal and
cosmically sweeping-a searing memoir and a profound reflection on
science, religion, and the human condition. With her signature
combination of intellectual rigor and uninhibited imagination,
Ehrenreich offers a true literary achievement-a work that has the
power not only to entertain but amaze.
Are women by their very nature as frail, as prone to disease, as
vulnerable and as inept as the experts appear to believe? In For
Her Own Good, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English dismantle 150
years of scientific and medical advice to women and ask why it was
that women were apparently so eager to accept the opinion of
'professionals' on every aspect of their lives - be it health care,
childcare, motherhood, diet, housework, or sex. Were the rules and
logic of scientific progress, supposedly working for the good of
humanity at large, as impartial as they were claimed to be? Or were
the expert opinions in fact just another weapon in the arsenal of
patriarchy - an effective device to subjugate adn neutralise women?
Ehrenreich and English supply a fascinating perspective on female
history in this brilliant account of pundits and their victims over
the last century and a half.
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