
Nickel and Dimed
On (Not) Getting By in America
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Narrated by:
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Cristine McMurdo-Wallis
About this listen
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.
©2001 Barbara Ehrenreich (P)2004 Recorded Books, LLCListeners also enjoyed...
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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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In her extraordinary best seller, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc immerses listeners in the intricacies of the ghetto, revealing the true sagas lurking behind the headlines of gangsta glamour, gold-drenched drug dealers, and street-corner society. Focusing on two romances - Jessica's dizzying infatuation with a hugely successful young heroin dealer, Boy George; and Coco's first love with Jessica's little brother, Cesar - Random Family is the story of young people trying to outrun their destinies.
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Speechless
- By Amazon Customer on 09-02-19
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A Mercy
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 6 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in "flesh," he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, "with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady." Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.
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Great book
- By Pablo Tebas on 01-18-09
By: Toni Morrison
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All Aunt Hagar's Children
- Selected Stories
- By: Edward P. Jones
- Narrated by: James Peter Francis
- Length: 14 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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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!
- By Mimi Routh on 07-05-15
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Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
- Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
- By: Saidiya Hartman
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the 20th century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage.
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Utterly beautiful!
- By L.A. on 12-27-19
By: Saidiya Hartman
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The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
- Complete Collection
- By: Lydia Davis
- Narrated by: Mia Barron, Thérèse Plummer, Jonathan Davis
- Length: 21 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Lydia Davis is one of our most original and influential writers, a storyteller celebrated for her emotional acuity, her formal inventiveness, and her ability to capture the mind in overdrive. She has been called "an American virtuoso of the short story form" ( Salon.com ) and "one of the quiet giants... of American fiction" ( Los Angeles Times Book Review ). This volume contains all her stories to date, from the acclaimed "Break It Down" (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee "Varieties of Disturbance".
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Intro & Outro’s Ruin It
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By: Lydia Davis
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Evicted
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- Unabridged
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In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they each struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Hailed as “wrenching and revelatory” (The Nation), “vivid and unsettling” (New York Review of Books), Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America’s most devastating problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.
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Former Property Manager
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By: Matthew Desmond
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Veronica
- By: Mary Gaitskill
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- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by a photographer and swept into the world of fashion-modeling in Paris and Rome. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City to build a new life. There she meets Veronica: an older wisecracking eccentric with her own ideas about style, a proofreader who comes to work with a personal "office kit" and a plaque that reads "Still Anal After All These Years".
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Everything is baroque-en
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Maid
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- By: Stephanie Land, Barbara Ehrenreich - foreword
- Narrated by: Stephanie Land
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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At 28, Stephanie Land's dreams of attending a university and becoming a writer quickly dissolved when a summer fling turned into an unplanned pregnancy. Before long, she found herself a single mother, scraping by as a housekeeper to make ends meet. Maid is an emotionally raw, masterful account of Stephanie's years spent in service to upper-middle-class America as a "nameless ghost" who quietly shared in her clients' triumphs, tragedies, and deepest secrets.
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Very engaging
- By NMwritergal on 01-24-19
By: Stephanie Land, and others
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Citizen
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- Length: 1 hr and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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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
- By David P on 08-30-17
By: Claudia Rankine
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The Other Name
- Septology I-II
- By: Jon Fosse, Damion Searls - translator
- Narrated by: Kyle Snyder
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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The Other Name follows the lives of two men living close to each other on the west coast of Norway. The year is coming to a close and Asle, an aging painter and widower, is reminiscing about his life. He lives alone, his only friends being his neighbor, Åsleik, a bachelor and traditional Norwegian fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in Bjørgvin, a couple hours drive south of Dylgja, where he lives. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter. He and the narrator are doppelgangers—two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life.
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Ear worms galore
- By ET on 10-10-23
By: Jon Fosse, and others
What listeners say about Nickel and Dimed
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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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- ‘Nette
- 02-01-15
Finally read/listened to this book
Would you consider the audio edition of Nickel and Dimed to be better than the print version?
Don't think I am qualified to answer this question as I have not got the print version.
What was one of the most memorable moments of Nickel and Dimed?
When one of the people she worked with was my namesake. Yes, I know those were fake names, but still.
Which scene was your favorite?
Not really a scene, but when Ehrenreich wrote that all the people she met in the course of writing this book took pride in what their job, no one was a slob or a slacker. That really moved me.
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- Mauricio
- 06-29-21
Are things better today?
Interesting book. Well written, and well read. Provides perspective to those that think that people are poor because they want to.
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