..Book Reviews..

You're an unskilled worker in Anytown, USA. You make $7.50 an hour in a dead end job that required a cup of your urine and a piece of your soul. You live in a hotel where you pay $225 per week to live with no screens on your windows, no privacy, no quiet, and a bathroom so close to your kitchen you try not to think about spreading bacteria. Fun for the weekend involves sharing a 40 ouncer with your friends because both bad beer and talk are cheap.

She casts off every vestige of privilege she can (Ehrenreich would have to become a non-English speaking immigrant for this book to be truly accurate) and joins the low-income workforce. She poses as a waitress and briefly as a hotel maid in Key West, Florida, a house cleaner and nursing home aide in Portland, Maine, and a Wal-Mart lackey in Minneapolis.

Ehrenreich barely survives in each location, struggling through the grueling workdays filled with indignity, and trying to find a safe place to live in the off-hours. In most cases she kept from going under by pulling up stakes and starting again in another part of the country, an endeavor made possible only by the savings of an undercover reporter.

Her experience is tiring, the situation deplorable, and her writing peppered with intriguing footnote factoids and humorous observations. Ehrenreich's ability to bailout of poverty and return home makes the book seem like a cop-out--if this is her experience, what's it like for the millions who have no way out of poverty?

More:

"The worst, for some reason, are Visible Christians -- like the ten-person table, all jolly and sanctified after Sunday night service, who run me mercilessly and then leave me $1 on a $92 bill. Or the guy with the crucifixion T-shirt (someone to look up to) who complains that his baked potato is too hard and his iced tea too icy (I cheerfully fix both) and leaves no tip at all. As a general rule, people wearing crosses or WWJD? ("What Would Jesus Do?") buttons look at us disapprovingly no matter what we do, as if they were confusing waitressing with Mary Magdalene's original profession." (page 36)

"The preaching goes on, interrupted with dutiful 'amens.' It would be nice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and the need for a hike in the minimum wage. But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth. I would like to stay around for the speaking in tongues, should it occur, but the mosquitoes, worked into a frenzy by all this talk of His blood, are launching a full-scale attack. I get up to leave, timing my exit for when the preacher's metronomic head movements have him looking the other way, and walk out to search for my car, half expecting to find Jesus out there in the dark, gagged and tethered to a tent pole," (page 68-69).

More on the religious asides in Nickel and Dimed.