Barbara Ehrenreich

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.

Life, Death and the Illusion of Control

Natural Causes

Exposes the downside of America's penchant for positive thinking, which the author believes leads to self-blame and a preoccupation with stamping out "negative" thoughts on a personal level, and, on a national level, has brought on economic disaster.

How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

Bright-sided

A History of Women Healers (Glass Mountain Pamphlets)

Witches, Midwives, and Nurses

The author of the critically acclaimed Blood Rites examines the human impulse toward collective joy, historically expressed in communal celebrations, reflecting the human nature as social beings, involving ecstatic revelries of feasting, costuming, and dancing, from the ancient Greeks' worship of Dionysus to the more recent “carnivalization” of sports. 60,000 first printing.

A History of Collective Joy

Dancing in the Streets

Deirdre English

Looks at the history of medical practice, argues that the suppression of female healers began with the European witch hunts, and describes the sexism of the current medical establishment

A History of Women Healers

An updated history of the experts, largely men, who have given professional advice to women makes the point that this advice has been unscientific, arrogant, biased, and generally self-serving and exposes the myths told to women in the name of science. Original.

Two Centuries of the Experts' Advice to Women

For Her Own Good

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.

A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything

Living with a Wild God

A new selection of the most provocative, incendiary, and career-making pieces by bestselling author, essayist, political activist, and "veteran muckraker" (The New Yorker) Barbara Ehrenreich. A self-proclaimed "myth buster by trade," Barbara Ehrenreich has covered an extensive range of topics as a journalist and political activist, and is unafraid to dive into intellectual waters that others deem too murky. Now, Had I Known gathers the articles and excerpts from a long-ranging career that most highlight Ehrenreich's brilliance, social consciousness, and wry wit. From Ehrenreich's award-winning article "Welcome to Cancerland," published shortly after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, to her groundbreaking undercover investigative journalism in Nickel and Dimed, to her exploration of death and mortality in the New York Times bestseller, Natural Causes, Barbara Ehrenreich has been writing radical, thought-provoking, and worldview-altering pieces for over four decades. Her reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review, among others, while her essays, op-eds and feature articles have appeared in The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Time, The Wall Street Journal, and many more. Had I Known pulls from the vast and varied collection of one of our country's most incisive thinkers to create one must-have volume.

Collected Essays

Had I Known

A brilliant and insightful exploration of the rise and fall of the American middle class by New York Times bestselling author, Barbara Ehrenreich. One of Barbara Ehrenreich's most classic and prophetic works, Fear of Falling closely examines the insecurities of the American middle class in an attempt to explain its turn to the right during the last two decades of the 20th century. Weaving finely-tuned expert analysis with her trademark voice, Ehrenreich traces the myths about the middle class to their roots, determines what led to the shrinking of what was once a healthy percentage of the population, and how, in its ambition and anxiety, that population has retreated from responsible leadership. Newly reissued and timely as ever, Fear of Falling places the middle class of yesterday under the microscope and reveals exactly how we arrived at the middle class of today.

The Inner Life of the Middle Class

Fear of Falling

Arlie Russell Hochschild

Two social scientists chart the consequences of the global economy on women across the world, revealing the underground economy that has turned many poor women into virtual slaves. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy

Global Woman

The New York Times bestselling investigation into white-collar unemployment from "our premier reporter of the underside of capitalism"--The New York Times Book Review Americans' working lives are growing more precarious every day. Corporations slash employees by the thousands, and the benefits and pensions once guaranteed by "middle-class" jobs are a thing of the past. In Bait and Switch, Barbara Ehrenreich goes back undercover to explore another hidden realm of the economy: the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed. Armed with the plausible résumé of a professional "in transition," she attempts to land a "middle-class" job. She submits to career coaching, personality testing, and EST-like boot camps, and attends job fairs, networking events, and evangelical job-search ministries. She is proselytized, scammed, lectured, and--again and again--rejected. Bait and Switch highlights the people who have done everything right--gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive résumés--yet have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster. There are few social supports for these newly disposable workers, Ehrenreich discovers, and little security even for those who have jobs. Worst of all, there is no honest reckoning with the inevitable consequences of the harsh new economy; rather, the jobless are persuaded that they have only themselves to blame. Alternately hilarious and tragic, Bait and Switch, like the classic Nickel and Dimed, is a searing exposé of the cruel new reality in which we all now live.

The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

Bait and Switch

Our sharpest and most original social critic goes "undercover" as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of American prosperity. Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job -- any job -- can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you int to live indoors. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. You will never see anything -- from a motel bathroom to a restaurant meal -- in quite the same way again.

On (Not) Getting By in America

Nickel and Dimed

The Sexual Politics of Sickness (Glass Mountain Pamphlet)

Complaints and Disorders

A New York Times Notable BookAn ALA Notable Book "Original and illuminating." --The Washington Post What draws our species to war? What makes us see violence as a kind of sacred duty, or a ritual that boys must undergo to "become" men? Newly reissued in paperback, Blood Rites takes readers on an original journey from the elaborate human sacrifices of the ancient world to the carnage and holocaust of twentieth-century "total war." Ehrenreich sifts deftly through the fragile records of prehistory and 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 experiences of predation by stronger carnivores. Brilliant in conception and rich in scope, Blood Rites is a monumental work that continues to transform our understanding of the greatest single threat to human life.

Origins and History of the Passions of War

Blood Rites

American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment

The Hearts of Men

A brilliant, savagely funny attack on the cult of positive thinking - Ehrenreich's most commercial book since Nickel and Dimed.

How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World

Smile Or Die

In this sequel to their underground bestseller Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, Ehrenreich and English document the tradition of American sexism in medicine before and after the turn of the century. Citing numerous 'treatments' and 'rest cures' perpetrated on women through the decades, they analyze the biomedical rationales used to justify sex discrimination.

The Sexual Politics of Sickness

The social commentator and author of The Worst Years of Our Lives presents a satirical critique that denounces the twenty-first-century's first political decade as the cruelest in memory, in a report that analyzes such modern challenges as political and corporate corruption, the widening economic gap, and a rise in extreme conservatism.

Reports from a Divided Nation

This Land Is Their Land

Elizabeth Hess

Gloria Jacobs

This book reveals the origins of contemporary sexual attitudes and offers a clear perspective on the evolving nature of female sexuality

Barbara Ehrenreich

Books

Your next favorite book is out there