A Brief Review Of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel And Dimed
In a New York Times article, “Too Poor to Make the News,” author Barbara Ehrenreich focuses on the impact the recession has caused to the lives of the working poor. She begins her article by describing how the newly group, known as Nouveau poor, have to give up valuables where as the working poor have to give up housing, food, and prescription medicines. Ehrenreich’s purpose is to inform her readers who are blessed enough not to suffer like the working poor. Barbara Ehrenreich’s article examines the impacts the recession has on the lives of the working poor, by demonstrating pathos, and makes readers aware of the sufferings the poor have to face. Barbara Ehrenreich examines the aspects that are impacting the working poor from the recession.
The books, Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, are exemplary models of an American family in poverty, and their journey and struggle to survive. They had to live off of what they had and they thought their lifestyles were normal until realizing others have it easier. Each of these families used different strategies in order to survive their insolvent circumstances and hardships. In Salvage the Bones, Esch and her family kept moving and giving each other strength to survive, during a devastating storm in which left them homeless. In The Glass Castle, even though the Walls family was in poverty and didn’t have a permanent home and were always moving.
Melanie Castellanos Daniels ENGL 3 - B5 26 August 2014 Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America: Merit of Experiences Although much criticism revolves around Barbara Ehrenreich’s experiences as a minimum wage worker, it can be widely recognized by various critics that she deserves credit for at least attempting to understand the lower class, considering her privilege as a white, wealthy, middle-aged woman. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America is a novel regarding minimum wage workers and a single woman’s experience jumping into the lower class; the overall theme of the book is that even the lowest class deserve more credit for their hard work, long hours, and demeaning lifestyles. Overall, Ehrenreich is praised for her bravery to dive into a minimum wage lifestyle. Although at first it seems demeaning for such a wealthy and
“poverty”(170). Larger Occasion In 2007, 28 percent of Baltimore’s children lived in poverty. Both the author’s mother and the other Wes Moore’s mother struggled to provide for their children. Both took extra jobs in the hopes of providing their children with a better life.
Verbal irony through a sarcastic tone strengthens the central claim since many people respond well to being addressed in a more satirical, direct manner. Barbara continues discussing the Maids, “no one is going to say, after I vacuum ten rooms and still have time to scrub the kitchen floor, “Goddamn, Barb, you’re so good!”” (Ehrenreich 117). The fact that the middle-class doesn’t even understand the amount of hard work that is done addresses the subclaim of how hard life is while working minimum wage, or close to it, jobs, while still using a sarcastic tone. The audience of middle-class Americans will most likely put down this memoir feeling a call to action to change the operation of the treatment of these trapped
Moreover, there is a copious amount of stories of people struggling to survive. We experience some of those accounts in Nickel and Dimed by journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich, a novel about the working class of America, and also in Living
When You Can’t Afford Sleep In “When You Can’t Afford Sleep,” Olga Khazan discusses the issue of low-income workers having more sleep problems compared to the people with high-income. She explores the lives of a few low-income workers, particularly Sam McCalman, to present their everyday struggles. McCalman, an immigrant in the United States from Guyana, works two jobs since he is in need of cash to cover expenses and payments such as money for raising children, and rent. Khazan explains that McCalman has to be ready early in order to catch the bus to work due to the absence of his own transportation, and he often falls asleep at work.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 43.6 million of Americans live in poverty in the United States. There are many opportunities these days for Americans to get out of poverty including a job. Earning any job can help find a better job placement and learn job skills as oppose to unemployment. Doing well in a job can help allude employers give a better job to an employee. Many employers will look at work ethics within employees and if the credentials—amount of jobs, hours, and dedication put into—is sufficient, then the employer would move the employee to a better working place.
My initial thoughts to the book $2.00 a day itself was extremely surprising and eye opening. I think most Americans never really think that this level extreme poverty actually exists right here in our own country. Beginning in Chapter 4, Edin and Shaefer explain what some of things people who live on $2.00 a day do in order to increase their cash income. One of the items they mention was selling plasma. They can make up to $60 by going twice a week.
The author, Matthew Desmond visited Milwaukee to live with under privileged families to see how the eviction process takes place in America. Informing society and telling a first had experience that involved, evidence, research, and passion. With this in mind, he then wants to educate the public on how society can change and make poverty less of an issue in America today. Desmond uses living with these poor families, watching the struggle, kids suffer, and then eventually get evicted, as evidence.
Because these characters represent their respective nations, the end of their stories portray what their authors predict the future of their countries will be like. In doing so, these novels impact the culture of their countries by providing a voice to groups of people who had none before. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the downfall of the Buendía family is caused by the repetition of their sins. The family line comes to a tragic end in an event predicted decades ago, as “it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of man,” which happened only because the Buendía family kept repeating their incestuous ways (Marquez 417). They are trapped in a cycle of history, and Marquez predicts the same tragic, yet realistic, outcome for Colombia if the country keeps repeating the same mistakes.
J.D Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is a personal psychological, cultural and sociological analysis of poor white working-class Americans. Specifically, Hillbilly Elegy examines the life of the author in Middletown Ohio, a once booming post war steel town that today has a struggling economy, diminishing family values and a rapid increase in drug abuse. At the beginning of the memoir, Vance perfectly situates the reader to the uniqueness from his life in Middletown. Vance repeatedly wrote throughout the memoir that the youth living in this Ohio steel town has a bleak and troubling future. Vance illustrates the statistics that children like him living in these towns were lucky if they just manage to avoid welfare or unlucky by dying from a heroin overdose.
In the discussions of food insecurity, one controversial issue has been the prevalent misconception of why people are suffering from obtaining nutritious food on a consistent basis. On one hand, Frank Eltman, a writer for the Business facet of the Huffington post, argues that university students are facing food insecurity due to college expenses exponentially rising within the past decade. On the other hand, Adam Appelhanz, a police officer featured in the documentary “A Place at the Table,” contends that due to budget constraints he has not received a pay raise in the last four years, and is now inevitably utilizing a local food bank in order to ensure that he has something to eat each month. Others even maintain that food insecurity is synonymous
One of the best-selling authors, Barbara Ehrenreich, in her narrative essay, “Serving in Florida,” describes her personal experience working in a local restaurant called Jerry’s. Ehrenreich’s purpose is to attach importance to the low-wage America workplace. Using rhetorical strategies such as negative diction, simile, images, and pathos, Ehrenreich attempts to raise public awareness of the low-wage workers’ life in her readers. Firstly, Barbara Ehrenreich exploits connotation of words and simile to emphasize the difficult life of the lower class.
No Nickels or Dimes To Spare In the book, Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich writes the story, “Serving in Florida.” She describes her experience living as an undercover waitress when in reality she’s a journalist for culture and politics with a doctorate in biology. Ehrenreich experiences trying to survive on multiple low income jobs to understand what it is like to be in their shoes instead of being apart of the higher middle class.
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