Barbara Ehrenreich

In this utterly original take on the American frame of mind, Barbara Ehrenreich traces the strange career of our sunny outlook from its origins as a marginal nineteenth-century healing technique to its enshrinement as a dominant, almost mandatory, cultural attitude. Evangelical mega-churches preach the good news that you only have to want something to get it, because God wants to "prosper" you. The medical profession prescribes positive thinking for its presumed health benefits. Academia has made room for new departments of "positive psychology" and the "science of happiness." Nowhere, though, has bright-siding taken firmer root than within the business community, where, as Ehrenreich shows, the refusal even to consider negative outcomes—like mortgage defaults—contributed directly to the current economic crisis. With the myth-busting powers for which she is acclaimed, Ehrenreich exposes the downside of America’s penchant for positive thinking: On a personal level, it leads to self-blame and a morbid preoccupation with stamping out “negative” thoughts. On a national level, it’s brought us an era of irrational optimism resulting in disaster. This is Ehrenreich at her provocative best—poking holes in conventional wisdom and faux science, and ending with a call for existential clarity and courage.

"Cultural historian Ehrenreich explores a human impulse that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the desire for collective joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing. She uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. Although 16th-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and "savage," Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks to medieval Christianity. Ultimately, church officials drove the festivities into the streets, Protestants criminalized carnival, Wahhabist Muslims battled ecstatic Sufism, European colonizers wiped out native dance rites. The elites' fear that such gatherings would undermine social hierarchies was justified: the festive tradition inspired uprisings and revolutions from France to the Caribbean to the American plains. Yet outbreaks of group revelry persist, as Ehrenreich shows, pointing to the 1960s rock-and-roll rebellion and the more recent "carnivalization" of sports.--From publisher description."--From source other than the Library of Congress

The author's experience holding low-wage jobs in three parts of the U.S. in the late 1990s.

In this collection of essays, her first since the best-selling The Worst Years of Our Lives, Barbara Ehrenreich delves into the soul of the 1990s in search of the American zeitgeist after "The Decade of Greed.". What she finds is a sour passivity. Only a homicidal car-rental spokesman or penis-severing small-town manicurist can induce a brief outbreak of giddiness. The youthful, pumped-up look has given way to menopause chic, and our biggest hope for a national health program is that it will provide coverage for Dr. Jack Kevorkian's services. Even channel surfing may have to be automated soon if the current listlessness continues.

Della Markson is searching for her son, a brilliant, nihilistic computer hacker who has invented an addictive computer game. Her former professor, Alex MacBride, an academic has-been desperately in need of a publication and a drink, is looking for the papers of an obscure, long-dead neurobiologist. As they stumble through a suburban landscape littered with broken marriages and blighted careers, they discover that their personal quests are of great interest to mysterious others, and that they have been drawn into a grand design full of wondrous possibilities and perilous meanings. For Della and Alex live in a hyper-real world of strange portents and accelerating decay. Caterpillars are destroying the trees. A cracked but eerily lucid evangelist preaches apocalypse on a pirate frequency. And in the renowned biological research institute where Della and Alex work, escaped laboratory animals roam the corridors, hazardous wastes leak unchecked, and a lethal new disease is outwitting the researchers. In this menacing yet unsettlingly familiar environment, the search for Della's son and Alex's missing papers turns out to hinge on the ancient quest for the ultimate purpose of human intelligence and life. A startling feat of the imagination from one of our sharpest social observers, Kipper's Game is a daring and sophisticated adventure at the interface of science and metaphysics, human love and the equally human hunger for knowledge.

Ehrenreich here reprints a selection of her elegantly satirical essays that were originally published in Ms., Mother Jones and other journals during the Reagan years, articles in which she skewers political figures and others for causing a decay in human values. A strong sense of the ridiculous informs Ehrenreich's attack on those she judges guilty: phony evangelists, moneyed polluters and developers, Wall Street bandits, officials heedless of the poor. There are pieces on Nancy Reagan's memoir My Turn and on Oliver North as warrior prince of the secret government. The book has its critics, but Ehrenreich could also promote healthy rebellions in her role as someone who doesn't suffer fools at all, let alone grudgingly.--adapted from Publishers Weekly.

"From prescribing the "rest cure" to diagnosing hysteria, the medical profession has consistently treated women as weak and pathological. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English's concise history of the sexual politics of medical practices shows how this biomedical rationale was used to justify sex discrimination throughout the culture, and how its vestiges are evident in abortion policy and other reproductive rights struggles today.Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of many bestselling books, including Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America and Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.Deirdre English, former editor of Mother Jones magazine, is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism"--Provided by publisher. "From prescribing the "rest cure" to diagnosing hysteria, the medical profession has consistently treated women as weak and pathological. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English's concise history of the sexual politics of medical practices shows how the biomedical rationale was used to justify sex discrimination throughout the culture, and how its vestiges are evident in abortion policy and other reproductive rights struggles today"--Provided by publisher.

Witches, Midwives, and Nurses examines how women-led healing was delegitimized to make way for patriarchy, capitalism, and the emerging medical industry. As we watch another agonizing attempt to shift the future of healthcare in the United States, we are reminded of the longevity of this crisis, and how firmly entrenched we are in a system that doesn't work. First published by the Feminist Press in 1973, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses is an essential book about the corruption of the medical establishment and its historic roots in witch hunters. In this new and updated edition, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English delve into the current fascination with and controversies about witches, exposing our fears and fantasies. They build on their classic exposé on the demonization of women healers and the political and economic monopolization of medicine. This quick history brings us up-to-date, exploring today's changing attitudes toward childbirth, alternative medicine, and modern-day witches.

One woman's dip into poverty and how she worked her way out. A timely, culturally loved rags to riches, pulling oneself up by her bootstraps story.

"In middle age, Ehrenreich came across the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence and set out to reconstruct that quest, which had taken her to the study of science and through a cataclysmic series of uncanny-or as she later learned to call them, "mystical"-experiences. A staunch atheist and rationalist, she is profoundly shaken by the implications of her life-long search. Part memoir, part philosophical and spiritual inquiry, LIVING WITH A WILD GOD brings an older woman's wry and erudite perspective to a young girl's uninhibited musings on the questions that, at one point or another, torment us all. Ehrenreich's most personal book ever will spark a lively and heated conversation about religion and spirituality, science and morality, and the "meaning of life." Certain to be a classic, LIVING WITH A WILD GOD combines intellectual rigor with a frank account of the inexplicable, in Ehrenreich's singular voice, to produce a true literary achievement"--

It is a dark and sexy night......when business manager Natalie Brighton arrives at her employer's remote mountain castle. With a reputation almost as scandalous as the exotic, forbidden nature of his paintings, John Sartain indulges his sensuality...something she can't resist any more than she can resist him. But someone is trying to discredit him—a threat that could cost her this job. Worse, Natalie finds herself in the increasingly sinister hands of someone who might wish her real harm. Lascivious games, secrets and sensuous desires... Is it just a part of Sartain's seductive world, or is Natalie setting herself up for the ultimate fall?