Provost Gerald Intemann is pleased to announce Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich, as the 2010–2011 Common Freshman Reader.
This coming Fall will be the fifth year for our Common Freshman Reader. The Common Freshman Reader program invites first-year students—through reading, discourse, and engagement in and out of the classroom—to experience IUP as a university that actively encourages student participation and recognizes the educational value of active involvement in the intellectual life of the campus.
I am pleased to announce that the selection team for the Common Freshman Reader has picked Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich, as our 2010–2011 Common Freshman Reader. A special thank you goes to those faculty members who participated in the selection process. I look forward to see the many ways in which this book will engage the university community in lively discussion and discourse this coming year.
Acclaimed as an instant classic upon publication, Nickel and Dimed has sold more than 1.5 million copies. Chosen for “one book” initiatives across the country, it has fueled nationwide campaigns for a living wage and has become an essential part of the nation’s political discourse.
A close observer and astute analyzer of American life (The Worst Years of Our Life and The Fear of Falling), Ehrenreich turns her attention to what it is like trying to subsist while working in low-paying jobs. Inspired to see what boom times looked like from the bottom, she hides her real identity and attempts to make a life on a salary of just over $300 per week after taxes. She is often forced to work at two jobs, leaving her time and energy for little else than sleeping and working.
Ehrenreich vividly describes her experiences living in isolated trailers and dilapidated motels while working as a nursing-home aide, a Wal-Mart “sales associate,” a cleaning woman, a waitress, and a hotel maid in three states—Florida, Maine, and Minnesota. Her narrative is candid, often moving, funny at times, passionate, and very revealing.
Looking back on her experiences, Ehrenreich claims that the hardest thing for her to accept is the “invisibility of the poor”; one sees them daily in restaurants, hotels, discount stores, and fast-food chains, but one doesn’t recognize them as “poor” because, after all, they have jobs. Her firsthand account of life in low-wage America provides no real answers to the problem but does create a compelling sketch of its reality and pervasiveness.
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of fourteen books, including This Land Is Their Land and the New York Times bestsellers Bait and Switch and Fear of Falling. A frequent contributor to Harper’s and The Nation, she has also been a columnist at the New York Times and Time magazine.
—Summary provided by Susan Drummond,
IUP Librarian
Sincerely,
Gerald W. Intemann, Ph.D.
Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs
