This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation

This book was published in 2008, but with the Occupy Wall Street movement garnering national attention, now seemed like the ideal time for me to finally get around to reading it. Ehrenreich has a lot to say about the widening gap between the ultra-rich and the rest of us, the difficulties involved in being poor in America (including the problem of health care), and the abuses corporations get away with heaping on their employees. She also talks a bit, towards the end, about issues such as gay marriage, abortion, and the cultural mindset that gives us such self-deluding self-help principles as "the Secret."

Each chapter here is only three or four pages long, delivering a small, pointed little nugget of social criticism. I believe all or show more most of these were originally published elsewhere, although it would have been good for that to have been stated in the introduction, since it feels oddly structured if you try to approach it as a unified work: a little disjointed, occasionally slightly repetitive, and prone to rely more on anecdote than on deep analysis. Ehrenreich's often-satirical writing is very sharp, though, sometimes blisteringly so, and the problems she's addressing are important and very real. In the end, it isn't terribly cohesive, but it does manage to be simultaneously entertaining and rather depressing to read. show less

SUCH a disappointment! I loved Nicked and Dimed; I thought Bait and Switch a solid follow-up, if perhaps not quite as sharp or sassy as its predecessor. But this work was just limp and uninspired.

If you were expecting a book with a solid thesis, look elsewhere; This Land is Their Land is just a collection of essays by Ehrenreich, some of which have been previously published in other sources. Lacking any formal citations, they read as editorials - Ehrenreich's opinions, nothing more. And unfortunately, with no research to back up those opinions, they become quite grating - even to a reader that has, in the past, agreed with at least some of her opinions and philosophies.

(In truth, by the end, I was not only irritated, but downright show more confused. What's with the religion-bashing at the end? In her criticism of religion, I couldn't help feeling like she was throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and ignoring the good aspects of many religious organizations.)

Frankly, whether you are familiar with Ehrenreich or not, I'd give this one a pass. show less

This is a collection of short essays, opinion pieces really, written by Barbara Ehrenreich. They mostly touch on topics related to the working class and poor and their challenges with work and family. It's a little dated. It was published in 2009, and obviously written before the bulk of the current economic crisis hit. It would be interesting to hear what she has to say about the crisis and its effect on the same people she is writing about now. The author has a great sense of humor, and really sticks it to Bush & co. though sometimes her positions are a bit extreme.

I enjoyed this book. The book read like a bunch of blog posts, which I liked for the ease of read. The author really does a great job of whittling down the big problems of the country and writing about them in a humorous, yet sincere, way.

I love to read Barbara Ehrenreich's books, so I can feed off of her righteous indignation about all of the nasty things that are happening in the world and in the United States. I think both her and I have no idea how to fix these seemingly insurmountable problems. But I guess all we can do is try.
These are extreme statements of the author's position on a topic, just as many other reviewers have pointed out. I think we can all allow ourselves and others to rant and to vent our spleen once in a while. Then when we're all done that, we can get back to debate and constructive efforts. But I wouldn't deprive of the opportunity she has taken in this book, because we all need to do that once in a while.
I like journalism/editorial collections show more like this because you can read a 3 or 5 page article in a couple of minutes and carry on with your day. Good for reading on the bus or when you are waiting for someone to get off the phone. In a similar vein, I am going to read the Gonzo Papers by Hunter S. Thompson, although his articles are a bit longer.
Very good quality writing. I enjoy her style where she makes outlandish proposals that are so ridiculous that, after you finish rejecting them, then you realize that there really is something that has to be fixed, that you just thought was maybe that serious previously, and you had just been sloughing it off and had apathetically not been paying attention. This is exactly like one of the most famous examples: when Jonathon Swift made "A Modest Proposal" and he wrote about a solution for Irish famine. show less

I happen to agree with Ms. Ehrenreich on 99% of points, but her writing style at times rubbed me the wrong way, especially when she was deriding people for believing in God. I am sure a lot of the incendiary comments were there just to annoy conservatives, but it distracted from my enjoyment of the book.

5 stars for content, 2 stars for writing style.

This was an excellent book...Barbara Ehrenreich tells it as it is, and now, just when the election campaign is on the last chapter, incredibly fresh in its view of the US, despite its date of publication.