Review by Choice Review
It is no secret that the glitter and glamour of the US, like Hollywood sets, is a facade behind which lurk some uncomfortable realities. It is small consolation that this is the case with many nations. This book focuses on one of the least-known truths about the post-recession US: a vast number of people were affected in unimaginable ways. They have temporary jobs, live in RVs, and live nomadic lives. Businesses and industries find in them cheap labor without going to Bangladesh or Vietnam. The activist-journalist who wrote the book lived in an RV herself, meeting and interviewing hundreds of these new nomads. This eye-opening book, written with care and compassion, should make all Americans angry and embarrassed that this could happen in the richest country in the world. It may also make them proud that so many of their compatriots whose lives radically changed for the worse are coping with the new status quo gracefully and with hardiness. This is a moving book. One would hope that congressional representatives and senators, business people, and Wall Street leaders will read this book and resolve to clean up the dirty linen that has been exposed for all to see. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. --Varadaraja V. Raman, emeritus, Rochester Institute of Technology
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
LIONESS: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel, by Francine Klagsbrun. (Schocken, $40.) Meir has often been as reviled in Israel as she is admired in the United States, but perspectives are shifting. Klagsbrun's absorbing biography suggests this woman politician made history in more ways than one. AN ODYSSEY: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, by Daniel Mendelsohn. (Knopf, $26.95.) A distinguished critic and classicist, Mendelsohn uses Homer's epic as a vehicle for telling his own intricately constructed story of a father and son and their travails through life and love. PRESIDENT MCKINLEY: Architect of the American Century, by Robert W. Merry. (Simon & Schuster, $35.) McKinley tends to be forgotten among American presidents, overshadowed by his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, but he was largely responsible for America's 20th-century role in the world. Merry's measured, insightful biography seeks to set the record straight. THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF ELIZABETH HARDWICK, edited by Darryl Pinckney. (New York Review, paper, $19.95.) These impeccably economical essays, collected here with a wise introduction by Pinckney, offer a rich immersion in Hardwick's brilliant mind and the minds of the writers she read so well. NOMADLAND: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, by Jessica Bruder. (Norton, $26.95.) In this brilliant and compassionate book, Bruder documents how a growing number of older people, post-recession refugees from the middle and working class, cross the land in their vans and R.V.s in search of work. THE SHADOW DISTRICT, by Arnaldur Indridason. (Thomas Dunne/ Minotaur, $25.99.) In this moody Icelandic mystery, a retired police officer investigates a present-day murder with apparent links to another crime, committed during the waning days of World War II, when the neutral nation was occupied by Allied troops. A BRIEF HISTORY OF EVERYONE WHO EVER LIVED: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes, by Adam Rutherford. (The Experiment, $25.95.) With a heady amalgam of science, history and a bit of anthropology, Rutherford offers a captivating primer on genetics and human evolution as told through our DNA. THE LAST BALLAD, by Wiley Cash. (Morrow/HarperCollins, $26.99.) Cash's novel revisits a 1929 textile union strike that turned deadly; his heroine is based on a real-life union organizer and folk singer now mostly lost to history. CATAPULT: Stories, by Emily Fridlund. (Sarabande, paper, $16.95.) This powerhouse of a first collection - by an author whose debut novel, "History of Wolves," was a finalist for this year's Man Booker Prize - is notable for its deft mix of humor and insight. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* What photographer Jacob Riis did for the tenement poor in How the Other Half Lives (1890) and what novelist Upton Sinclair did for stockyard workers in The Jungle (1906), journalist Bruder now does for a segment of today's older Americans forced to eke out a living as migrant workers. There is no rest for the aging, says Bruder, underscoring her focus on people, primarily near or past retirement, whose lives and expectations were upended by the 2008 recession. This powerhouse of a book grew out of Bruder's article, The End of Retirement, published in Harper's in 2014. She examines the phenomenon of a new tribe of down-and-outers workampers, or houseless people who travel the country in vans as they follow short-term jobs, such as harvesting sugar beets, cleaning campsites and toilets in wilderness parks, and stocking and plucking merchandise from bins at an Amazon warehouse, averaging 15 miles a shift walking the facility's concrete floors. Bruder spent three years shadowing and interviewing members of this new kind of wandering tribe. In the best immersive-journalism tradition, Bruder records her misadventures driving and living in a van and working in a beet field and at Amazon. Tying together the book is the story of Linda May, a woman in her sixties who takes on crushing jobs with optimistic aplomb. Visceral and haunting reporting.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Actor White engages listeners in Bruder's sociological study of a group of low-income, mostly white elderly Americans who travel from job to job in RVs to avoid the cost of a permanent home. These are men and women in their 60s, 70s, and even 80s who consider themselves not homeless but houseless, having lost their homes or opted to ditch their mortgages, taxes, and repair bills. Listeners will feel as if they are right there in Bruder's passenger seat, traveling with her to RV campsites, researching, and sharing grief and friendship with the "workampers." Among the people profiled is 64-year-old Linda May, who lives in a tiny trailer she calls the Squeeze Inn-"yeah, there's room, squeeze in"-and works as a "host" in trailer camps registering newcomers, repairing RVs, and cleaning toilets all day. She then heads to Amazon warehouses for long, exhausting night shifts sorting packages. White's friendly voice and easygoing conversational rhythm embeds listeners in the misery but also the camaraderie of these under-the-radar 21st-century nomads. A Norton hardcover. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Bruder (Burning Book) explores the relatively recent phenomenon of older citizens who find it necessary to continue working in order to make ends meet. These seniors live in RVs and travel across the country in search of temp jobs. Bruder spent three years and 15,000 miles to work alongside elder temps in a sugar beet-processing facility and an Amazon fulfillment warehouse. She explains various reasons why "Workampers" face this harsh reality, including poor or no retirement planning, no pension or IRA funds, minimal social security benefits, if any, chronic illnesses with no medical insurance, and market crashes. She also summarizes key economic data that reflect these rapidly increasing new nationwide "Hoovervilles." Bruder focuses on Amazon's "CamperForce" of nearly 80,000 temps who will be hired in the 2017 holiday shopping season. The low-paying, arduous jobs for them come with no benefits and require constant lifting, bending, squatting, and walking on concrete for ten- to 12-hour shifts. VERDICT Karen White's clearly enunciated, steady-paced narration nicely relates this densely packed information that is essential for all public libraries, especially those in communities experiencing this phenomenon. ["A must-read that is simultaneously hopeless and uplifting and certainly unforgettable": LJ 7/17 starred review of the Norton hc.]-Dale Farris, Groves, TX © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Journalist Bruder (Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man, 2007) expands her remarkable cover story for Harper's into a book about low-income Americans eking out a living while driving from locale to locale for seasonal employment.From the beginning of her immersion into a mostly invisible subculture, the author makes it clear that the nomadsmany of them senior citizensrefuse to think of themselves as "homeless." Rather, they refer to themselves as "houseless," as in no longer burdened by mortgage payments, repairs, and other drawbacks, and they discuss "wheel estate" instead of real estate. Most of them did not lose their houses willingly, having fallen victim to mortgage fraud, job loss, health care debt, divorce, alcoholism, or some combination of those and additional factors. As a result, they sleep in their cars or trucks or cheaply purchased campers and try to make the best of the situation. At a distance, the nomads might be mistaken for RV owners traveling the country for pleasure, but that is not the case. Bruder traveled with some of the houseless for years while researching and writing her book. She builds the narrative around one especially accommodating nomad, senior citizen Linda May, who is fully fleshed on the page thanks to the author's deep reporting. May and her fellow travelers tend to find physically demanding, low-wage jobs at Amazon.com warehouses that aggressively seek seasonal workers or at campgrounds, sugar beet harvest sites, and the like. The often desperate nomads build communities wherever they land, offering tips for overcoming common troubles, sharing food, repairing vehicles, counseling each other through bouts of depression, and establishing a grapevine about potential employers. Though very little about Bruder's excellent journalistic account offers hope for the future, an ersatz hope radiates from within Nomadland: that hard work and persistence will lead to more stable situations. Engaging, highly relevant immersion journalism. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
