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Book Summary and Reviews of Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich

Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich

Bait and Switch

The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  • Published:
  • Sep 2005, 256 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed explored the lives of low-wage workers. Now, in Bait and Switch,, she enters another hidden realm of the economy: the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed. Armed with a plausible résumé of a professional "in transition," she attempts to land a middle-class job—undergoing career coaching and personality testing, then trawling a series of EST-like boot camps, job fairs, networking events, and evangelical job-search ministries. She gets an image makeover, works to project a winning attitude, yet is proselytized, scammed, lectured, and—again and again—rejected.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

'Ehrenreich rightly points out how corporate culture's focus on "the power of the individual will" deters its employees from organizing against the market trends that are disenfranchising them, but her presentation of such arguments would have been a lot more convincing if she could have spent some time in a cubicle herself.' - PW.

This information about Bait and Switch was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Barbara Ehrenreich Author Biography

Barbara Ehrenreich was the author of more than 20 books, including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. She was a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Harpers, and the Progressive, as well as a contributing writer to Time magazine.

She died in September 2022 aged 81. Her daughter said the cause was a stroke. She continued to write into her eighties leaving an unfinished work about the evolution of narcissism.

According to her New York Times obituary, Ms. Ehrenreich said she believed that her job as a journalist was to shed light on the unnecessary pain in the world: "The idea is not that we will win in our own lifetimes and that's the measure of us...but that we will die trying."

Link to Barbara Ehrenreich's Website

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  • Nickel and Dimed jacket

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