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Nickel and Dimed
- On (Not) Getting By in America
- Narrated by: Cristine McMurdo-Wallis
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
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A successful author, Barbara Ehrenreich decides to see if she can scratch out a comfortable living in a blue-collar America obsessed with welfare "reform". Her first job is waitressing, which pulls in a measly $2.43 an hour plus tips. She moves around the country, trying her hand as a maid, a nursing home assistant, and a Wal-Mart salesperson. What she discovers is a culture of desperation, where workers take multiple thankless jobs just to keep a roof overhead.
Often humorous and always illuminating, Nickel and Dimed is a remarkable expose of the ugly flip side of the American dream.
Critic reviews
- Book Sense Book of the Year Award Finalist, Adult Non-Fiction, 2002
- Alex Award Winner, 2002
"One of today's most original writers." (The New York Times)
"A close observer and astute analyzer of American life, Ehrenreich turns her attention to what it is like trying to subsist while working in low-paying jobs....Her narrative is candid, often moving, and very revealing." (Library Journal)
"Delivering a fast read that's both sobering and sassy, she [Ehrenreich] gives readers pause about those caught in the economy's undertow, even in good times." (Publishers Weekly)
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Chairs. Neat people. Ugliness. War. Over six decades of intrepid reporting and elegant essays, Andy Rooney has proven a shrewd cultural analyst. Andy Rooney: 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit brings together the best of more than a half-century of work (including long-out-of-print pieces from his early years) in an unforgettable celebration of one of America’s funniest men. Like Mark Twain, Finley Peter Dunne (Mister Dooley) and Will Rogers, Andy Rooney is a classic chronicler of America, a writer for the ages.
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A good style
- By Denise L. Holtz on 11-04-16
By: Andy Rooney
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The Working Poor
- Invisible in America
- By: David K. Shipler
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 15 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Nobody who works hard should be poor in America, writes Pulitzer Prize-winner David Shipler. Clear-headed, rigorous, and compassionate, he journeys deeply into the lives of individual store clerks and factory workers, farm laborers and sweat-shop seamstresses, illegal immigrants in menial jobs and Americans saddled with immense student loans and paltry wages. They are known as the working poor.
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Textbook Perfect Discussion of the Problem
- By Cynthia on 07-28-12
By: David K. Shipler
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The Broken Road
- By: Richard Paul Evans
- Narrated by: Richard Paul Evans
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Celebrity Charles James can't shake the nightmare that wakes him each night. He sees himself walking down a long, broken highway, the sides of which are lit in flames. Where is he going? Why is he walking? What is the wailing he hears around him? By day he wonders why he's so haunted and unhappy when he has all he ever wanted - fame, fans, and fortune and the lavish lifestyle it affords him. Coming from a childhood of poverty and pain, this is what he's dreamed of. But now, at the pinnacle of his career, he's started to wonder if he's wanted the wrong things.
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Unresolved.
- By Ann Owen on 05-14-17
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Hardly Knew Her
- By: Laura Lippman
- Narrated by: Linda Emond, Francois Battiste
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Each of these ingenious tales is a gem, sometimes poignant, sometimes humorous, always filled with delightfully unanticipated twists and reversals. For people who have yet to listen to Lippman, get ready to experience the spellbinding power of "one of today's most pleasing storytellers" ( San Diego Union-Tribune). As for longtime devotees of her multiple award-winning novels, you'll discover that you hardly know her.
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I Love Laura Lippman
- By Joy on 07-15-11
By: Laura Lippman
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The Fran Lebowitz Reader
- By: Fran Lebowitz
- Narrated by: Fran Lebowitz
- Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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In "elegant, finely honed prose" (The Washington Post Book World), Lebowitz limns the vicissitudes of contemporary urban life—its fads, trends, crazes, morals, and fashions. By turns ironic, facetious, deadpan, sarcastic, wry, wisecracking, and waggish, Fran Lebowitz is always wickedly entertaining.
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Wonderful in her own voice.
- By Sue C on 11-07-12
By: Fran Lebowitz
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The Boys in the Bunkhouse
- Servitude and Salvation in the Heartland
- By: Dan Barry
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 9 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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In the tiny Iowa farm town of Atalissa, dozens of men, all with intellectual disabilities and all from Texas, lived in an old schoolhouse. Before dawn each morning, they were bussed to a nearby processing plant, where they eviscerated turkeys in return for food, lodging, and $65 a month. They lived in near servitude for more than 30 years, enduring increasing neglect, exploitation, and physical and emotional abuse.
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Our Brothers' Keepers?
- By Gillian on 12-01-16
By: Dan Barry
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Cooking as Fast as I Can
- A Chef’s Story of Family, Food, and Forgiveness
- By: Cat Cora
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 7 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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In Cooking as Fast as I Can, Cat Cora reveals, for the first time, coming-of-age experiences from early childhood sexual abuse to the realities of life as a lesbian in the Deep South. She shares how she found her passion in the kitchen and went on to attend the prestigious Culinary Institute of America and apprentice under Michelin-star chefs in France. After her big break as a cohost on the Food Network's Melting Pot, Cat broke barriers by becoming the first-ever female Iron Chef.
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Great listen for a chef
- By Nikki on 04-10-24
By: Cat Cora
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And When She Was Good
- By: Laura Lippman
- Narrated by: Linda Emond
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Heloise considers it a blessing to be a person who seldom attracts attention. In her suburb, she's just a mom, the young widow with the forgettable job, who somehow never misses a soccer game. In the state capital, she's the redheaded lobbyist with a good cause and a mediocre track record. But in discreet hotel rooms throughout the area, she's the woman of your dreams - if you can afford the hourly fee. For more than a decade, Heloise believed she was safe, managing to keep up this rigidly compartmentalized life. But her secret life is under siege. One county over, another so-called suburban madam has been found dead in her car, an apparent suicide.
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And When She Was Bad...
- By Carole T. on 08-18-12
By: Laura Lippman
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Laughing Without an Accent
- Adventures of an Iranian American, at Home and Abroad
- By: Firoozeh Dumas
- Narrated by: Firoozeh Dumas
- Length: 5 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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In the best-selling memoir Funny in Farsi, Firoozeh Dumas recounted her adventures growing up Iranian American in Southern California. Now she again mines her rich Persian heritage in Laughing Without an Accent, sharing stories both tender and humorous on being a citizen of the world, on her well-meaning family, and on amusing cultural conundrums, all told with insights into the universality of the human condition. (Hint: It may have to do with brushing and flossing daily.)
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Sigh
- By Sara on 01-29-14
By: Firoozeh Dumas
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I Hate Everyone, Except You
- By: Clinton Kelly
- Narrated by: Clinton Kelly
- Length: 4 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Clinton Kelly is probably best known for teaching women how to make their butts look smaller. But in I Hate Everyone, Except You, he reveals some heretofore unknown secrets about himself, like that he's a finicky connoisseur of 1980s pornography, a disillusioned critic of New Jersey's premier water parks, and perhaps the world's least enthused high school commencement speaker.
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Filthy language overshadowed stories
- By Doris on 04-29-17
By: Clinton Kelly
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The Duggars: 20 and Counting!
- Raising One of America's Largest Families - How They Do It
- By: Michelle Duggar, Jim Bob Duggar
- Narrated by: Michelle Duggar
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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The Duggars: 20 and Counting! is a behind-the-scenes look at the supersize family that fascinates millions of television viewers around the world. From Idaho to Istanbul, people want to know how Arkansas parents Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar efficiently and lovingly manage 19 happy, home-schooled children without going into debt—or losing their minds!
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Interesting perspective
- By Story Reader on 06-05-23
By: Michelle Duggar, and others
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Poor Audio Quality
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Returning to the city that inspired his first prize-winning book, Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city's power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens.
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I JUST DON'T KNOW ABOUT THIS!
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A Place of Greater Safety
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It is 1789, and three young provincials have come to Paris to make their way. Georges-Jacques Danton, an ambitious young lawyer, is energetic, pragmatic, debt-ridden - and hugely but erotically ugly. Maximilien Robespierre, also a lawyer, is slight, diligent, and terrified of violence. His dearest friend, Camille Desmoulins, is a conspirator and pamphleteer of genius. A charming gadfly, erratic and untrustworthy, bisexual and beautiful, Camille is obsessed by one woman and engaged to marry another, her daughter.
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Disaster
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Citizen
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Claudia Rankine's bold new audiobook recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in 21st-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV - everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive.
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Important Work But Audio Is Missing a Lot
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By: Claudia Rankine
What listeners say about Nickel and Dimed
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Kathryn Liggett
- 06-05-20
Prett Good but Necessarily Shallow
The author intro outlines the very reasonable and truthful limitations of the book: You can try to recreate working poverty but it is ultimately limited in realism because for a multitude of reasons.
It succeeds in providing a glimpse of low wage life and has some insightful moments particularly regarding the costs of poverty and why rational decision making (to the outsider) may not happen. The real shine is in the humor of the author and her wiseass remarks.
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- Erica
- 03-24-18
We’re still here
I can’t believe this book was written 17 years ago and here we are with no real change. The poor are still getting poorer and everyone just wants to blame the poor. I wish everyone read this book and took the time to really understand what is going on. I can only hope it doesn’t take another 17 years for something to give.
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- Iesha
- 01-03-19
Real life
I am so happy Barbara Ehrenreich take this real life experience. What she has done let’s us know that life is not easy.
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- Alxsteele
- 08-28-19
A Primer on Poverty in the United States
Nickeled and Dimed, On (Not) Getting By in America, is a first-person reflective work documenting the author’s attempts to make a sustainable living on minimum wage jobs. The book is structured around the locations where Barbara Ehrenreich gained her live-bodied experience, first in Florida, then in Maine, and finally in Minnesota. Ehrenreich balances descriptive narrative, third-person perspective, and scientific and economic research, painting a detailed picture of life at minimum wage. While the book is not comprehensive or thorough in its assessment of the problems of poverty and contributing factors, she does not portray it as such. Rather, she outlines her process and objectives clearly enough such that readers should not be disappointed in her final scope.
At the beginning of the book, Ehrenreich sets up the guidelines for her field experimentation. She draws from her background as a scientist to set the parameters of her time “under cover.” From there, she attempts to work and live off of minimum wage jobs in Key West, Florida where she works at a waitress. She portrays the sullen lifestyle of people, mostly women, trapped in the vicious cycle of living paycheck to paycheck. And her descriptions of the people she served (food to) were profoundly thought provoking. As a person of faith, I was particularly sobered into reflection by her description of Christians, writing:
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. (36)
In the next section of the book, Ehrenreich details her life in Maine working as a maid. Readers are forced to consider the exuberance of financial excess employed in such a way as to benefit the owner and only the owner. Ehrenreich reflects:
There seems to be a vicious cycle at work here, making ours not just an economy but a culture of extreme inequality. Corporate decision makers, and even some two-bit entrepreneurs like my boss at The Maids, occupy an economic position miles above that of the underpaid people whose labor they depend on. For reasons that have more to do with class—and often racial—prejudice than with actual experience, they tend to fear and distrust the category of people from which they recruit their workers. Hence the perceived need for repressive management and intrusive measures like drug and personality testing…. It is a tragic cycle, condemning us to ever deeper inequality, and in the long run, almost no one benefits but the agents of repression themselves. (212)
In the third working section of the book, Ehrenreich moves to Minnesota and takes up work at the local Wal-Mart. She conveys the litany of evaluations, assessments, tests, and training she and other new employees are subjected to. Recounting the often passive-aggressive or, more often, outright aggressive attitude of managers, she concludes:
Any dictatorship takes a psychological toll on its subjects. If you were treated as an untrustworthy person, a potential slacker, drug-addict or thief, you may begin to feel less trustworthy yourself. If you were constantly reminded of your lowly position in the social hierarchy, whether by individual managers or by a plethora of impersonal rules, you begin to accept that unfortunate status. (210)
Ehrenreich is thoughtful if not always fully informed. There is enough substance to force engaged readers to reflect on their own role in perpetuating cycles of poverty. If her research is dated, that is the result of time and not effort. Where she is perhaps over-dependent on research and reports from the Economic Policy Institute, to the neglect of other sources like the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services or the Bureau of Economic Analysis, one may conclude this is intention: calling into question the legitimacy of governmental reporting standards. If her opinions are sharp, well, frankly, that’s her prerogative as a writer.
I recommend Ehrenreich’s Nickeled and Dimed, not as an expert treaties or a model of slow, deep journalism, but as a text that brings poverty in the United States into focus. By marrying real data, verified research, and personal experience she avoids the ubiquitous anecdotal sob-story that such stories . Instead, she invites each of her readers to consider and then act on behalf of those enslaved by our economic practices and policies.
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- Lorenzo Hines
- 10-28-22
Great Body of Work
Barbara takes the relatively unusual stance of literally putting herself into someone else's shoes, the shoes od the working poor. While most, including myself, would not consider this to be a scientific study, I think it is even more in debt and validating than a clinical and sterile scientific study. It not only takes into account real life situations, but it also forces Barbara to grapple with real time and real life situations, something that a clinical study would find hard to replicate. This book is recommended for every psychology and Sociology class in the world.
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- Melissa G.
- 12-30-22
Necessary read for all Americans
Deeply researched and humbled look at the reality of the “working poor” in America. A must read for all Americans. I’m so grateful for this book. As someone that was able to jump from one socioeconomic class to another of higher status, I have seen firsthand the systems of inequality that perpetuate the hierarchy. The imposter syndrome I face is nothing compared to the health crisis, shorter lifespan, and difficulties of those who by no fault of their own, live this way. We must do better to support a living wage among our people to ensure the future is better and break the cycles of poverty.
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- Banksbanks
- 06-28-23
A Classic must Read!
Was she spying on me in my early 20’s while getting through college.
Lots of laughs and Wisdom
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- Sterling Kempf
- 10-12-23
A human exploration of a systemic problem
Excellent narration and writing of a selfless woman's journey into the soul-crushing poverty experienced by millions daily.
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- randy
- 01-14-17
Everyone should read this book
This is a book I would have not picked up for myself but it was a pick within my book club so I needed to give it a try. I thought I was an open minded, economic aware person until I read this book. my husband and I are now having our kids listen to it.
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- Amazon Customer
- 12-05-11
Who really makes your world work?
Would you listen to Nickel and Dimed again? Why?
I will listen to Nickel & Dimed again to understand more deeply the pathos of its characters, all taken from real-life, a pathos present every day wherever human persons are treated like objects existing for the benefit of the idol 'net-profit.'
What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative?
The author brings us with her on a journey of self-discovery as she encounters the lives of the invisible-people with whom she and all of us share our daily-lives, those overworked and underpaid workers upon whom we depend to make our worlds function smoothly. These workers, each of whom is precious in their own right, are Walmart greeters, clerks at Menards and the person behind the voice at the McDonald's drive-thru speaker, . Barbara Ehrenreich brings their humanity to us in a way we cannot ignore either in the book or as we hurry past the smiling clerk who meets us entering the store on our next shopping trip.
Which scene was your favorite?
The most memorable scenes for me were descriptions of the people the author encountered during her research, which she developed into the book's narrative.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
I listened to the book while driving, not in one sitting.
Any additional comments?
Writing this review encouraged me to listen again to this well-written, thought-provoking book that has lingered just below the surface of my own daily-grind helping me to know my otherwise unknown:
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