This weekend, I bought and read a copy of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. It's a terrific book, and I highly recommend it. In it, Ehrenreich undertakes a series of low-wage jobs in Florida, Maine, and Minnesota to find out what it's really like to be one of the working poor. She works as a waitress in Florida, a maid in Maine, and a Wal-Mart employee in Minnesota. This is embedded journalism of the not-so-glamorous kind, but the tenacity with which Ehrenreich tackles the Herculean tasks before her and the biting humor of her tales from her days spent walking the poverty-line tightrope are riveting and moving. To boot, Ehrenreich was in her 50s when she undertook this endeavor. If you've ever worked the grueling hours of a waitressing job, you can't help but be impressed. While the stunt memoir has become one more trend in book publishing as of late, there's something, in spite of all that, particularly powerful, if done right, about the experiences of those writers who dare immerse themselves so deeply in their stories. Escaping unscathed and unchanged is impossible. The best case scenarios is that the story bleeds. For those writers, their stories are like the mob. Just when you think you're out, you're pulled back in.
Who are these nutcases who would volunteer for an artificially daunting situation in order to entertain millions of strangers with their half-assed efforts to survive? -- Nickel and Dimed
