Compare and contrast - if you can.
Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Wage USA - Barbara Ehrenreich
Dirt Cheap: Life at the Wrong End of the Job Market - Elisabeth Wynhausen
Both authors are journalists who took a year out of their comfortable, well-paid journalistic lives to spend awhile on the other side of the poverty line. The most telling difference is that Ehrenreich is American, whereas you may know Wynhausen better from her work for The Australian - or if you're either older than me or as much of a nerd as I am, from The National Times (a weekly and now defunct paper which specialised in investigative journalism).
Quoting from the blurbs:
'Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round for poverty level wages. Distinguished journalist Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them, in order to find out how anyone survives on six to seven hours a day. Ehrenreich left home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find and accepted whatever job she was offered, from cleaning to care work, waitressing to folding clothes at Wal-Mart. So began a gruelling, hair-raising and darkly funny oddyssey through the underside of working America."
"Elisabeth Wynhausen has often written about the lives of the working poor. Dirt Cheap is her account of the year she joined them, going undercover to work as a factory hand, checkout chick, kitchen hand and cleaner, and attempting to live on her meagre earnings ... Caustic, courageous and often funny, Dirt Cheap is a unique view of class, power and middle management seen from the other side of the serving counter, and a very personal experience of what it is like to be underpaid, under-appreciated and part of Australia's emerging underclass."
Can YOU find all ten differences?
Nope, me neither.
I read Nickel and Dimed a couple of months ago - am about to start reading it again, as I've got a paper to write for next week - and when I heard that Elisabeth Wynhausen had undertaken a similar project, I went down to the Writer's Festival this morning to hear her talk about it. I was sufficiently intrigued by her talk to lay out for the book, went along to have it signed, made a snarky comment about what it's like to work three or four days a week, while going to uni four days a week, and how this was my first Sunday off in nearly eight months - the usual Sunday sorts of things. (Then I went to see Philip Nitchke, aka Dr Death, talk. Fun stuff.)
So, then I spent the afternoon reading. I've got to say, I'm not quite sold on Dirt Cheap. It's a bit over-familiar, if that makes any sense. While the subject matter is very similar to Nickel and Dimed - and Wynhausen does say that book was her inspiration to undertake the project - the turn of phrase and the emotional tone of both books is very similar, too.
It reminds me very much of the experience of reading The Naked Husband after I read The Bride Stripped Bare. You'll have heard of the latter - it made an enormous splash when the anonymous author (Nikki Gemmell) was outed in the British press before the book was even published. Meant to be a wild, sexy, no-holds barred novel - so raunchy that the author couldn't decently put her name to it. Now, that was clearly a marketing ploy, and a very clever one at that. Publishing that absurd book anonymously was the smartest thing Nikki Gemmell ever did. Anyhow, some guy whose name eludes me for the moment wrote a response to The Bride Stripped Bare, and he called it The Naked Husband. Instead of having a cheating wife, he had a cheating husband. Apart from that, it might have been the same damn book. Right down to the way both authors used punctuation. It was a highly confusing and odd experience. I don't think I even finished reading the second one, which is unusual for me.
To get back to minimum wage jobs, though, I'm still trying to decide how I feel about these books. On the one hand, I spent an hour this morning talking about the ridiculous state of Australian labour laws, and in a room that was dominated by sensible people, not members of the loony left - people I have little patience with. I think that packaging discussion like this in an amusing book is a good way to get the message out to people who, like me, have no time for the loony left.
On the other hand ... well, I think William Shatner - or was it Pulp? - said it best:
Everybody hates a tourist,
Especially one who thinks it's all such a laugh ...
Discuss.
Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Wage USA - Barbara Ehrenreich
Dirt Cheap: Life at the Wrong End of the Job Market - Elisabeth Wynhausen
Both authors are journalists who took a year out of their comfortable, well-paid journalistic lives to spend awhile on the other side of the poverty line. The most telling difference is that Ehrenreich is American, whereas you may know Wynhausen better from her work for The Australian - or if you're either older than me or as much of a nerd as I am, from The National Times (a weekly and now defunct paper which specialised in investigative journalism).
Quoting from the blurbs:
'Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round for poverty level wages. Distinguished journalist Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them, in order to find out how anyone survives on six to seven hours a day. Ehrenreich left home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find and accepted whatever job she was offered, from cleaning to care work, waitressing to folding clothes at Wal-Mart. So began a gruelling, hair-raising and darkly funny oddyssey through the underside of working America."
"Elisabeth Wynhausen has often written about the lives of the working poor. Dirt Cheap is her account of the year she joined them, going undercover to work as a factory hand, checkout chick, kitchen hand and cleaner, and attempting to live on her meagre earnings ... Caustic, courageous and often funny, Dirt Cheap is a unique view of class, power and middle management seen from the other side of the serving counter, and a very personal experience of what it is like to be underpaid, under-appreciated and part of Australia's emerging underclass."
Can YOU find all ten differences?
Nope, me neither.
I read Nickel and Dimed a couple of months ago - am about to start reading it again, as I've got a paper to write for next week - and when I heard that Elisabeth Wynhausen had undertaken a similar project, I went down to the Writer's Festival this morning to hear her talk about it. I was sufficiently intrigued by her talk to lay out for the book, went along to have it signed, made a snarky comment about what it's like to work three or four days a week, while going to uni four days a week, and how this was my first Sunday off in nearly eight months - the usual Sunday sorts of things. (Then I went to see Philip Nitchke, aka Dr Death, talk. Fun stuff.)
So, then I spent the afternoon reading. I've got to say, I'm not quite sold on Dirt Cheap. It's a bit over-familiar, if that makes any sense. While the subject matter is very similar to Nickel and Dimed - and Wynhausen does say that book was her inspiration to undertake the project - the turn of phrase and the emotional tone of both books is very similar, too.
It reminds me very much of the experience of reading The Naked Husband after I read The Bride Stripped Bare. You'll have heard of the latter - it made an enormous splash when the anonymous author (Nikki Gemmell) was outed in the British press before the book was even published. Meant to be a wild, sexy, no-holds barred novel - so raunchy that the author couldn't decently put her name to it. Now, that was clearly a marketing ploy, and a very clever one at that. Publishing that absurd book anonymously was the smartest thing Nikki Gemmell ever did. Anyhow, some guy whose name eludes me for the moment wrote a response to The Bride Stripped Bare, and he called it The Naked Husband. Instead of having a cheating wife, he had a cheating husband. Apart from that, it might have been the same damn book. Right down to the way both authors used punctuation. It was a highly confusing and odd experience. I don't think I even finished reading the second one, which is unusual for me.
To get back to minimum wage jobs, though, I'm still trying to decide how I feel about these books. On the one hand, I spent an hour this morning talking about the ridiculous state of Australian labour laws, and in a room that was dominated by sensible people, not members of the loony left - people I have little patience with. I think that packaging discussion like this in an amusing book is a good way to get the message out to people who, like me, have no time for the loony left.
On the other hand ... well, I think William Shatner - or was it Pulp? - said it best:
Everybody hates a tourist,
Especially one who thinks it's all such a laugh ...
Discuss.
posted by beck at 10:12 pm
1 comments
