Nickel and Dimed: Blue Collar Reality

Nickel and Dimed documents Barbara Ehrenreich's attempt to be financially solvent as a blue-collar service industry worker. In the process, she stares down the same dirty road as millions of Americans, cleaning homes and hotels, waiting tables and working at Wal-Mart. She relates a story which would make a cultural anthropologist proud and deftly avoids being preachy in the process.

I suspect there are writers who would bargain their souls to be able to write with such simple clarity and to make humor and gravity sit together so easily in the same paragraph. If you are interested in social issues, this book will confirm your suspicions and possibly incite you to activism. I would, however, recommend this book to almost anyone, because it is primarily a book about people - a topic that never gets old.

~Charles Dunham