Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbara Ehrenreich is an American journalist, bestselling author and activist, whose books have been frequently recommended on Five Books. In the wonderful bio on her website—where she writes about growing up and how she came to writing—she says, “I have never seen a conflict between journalism and activism: As a journalist, I search for the truth. But as a moral person, I am also obliged to do something about it.”
Books by Barbara Ehrenreich
“What makes her work exceptional is that it comes to us both as a personal witness of a very moving kind, and as part of a broader political project of an admirably consistent sort.” Read more...
The Best Essays: the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award
Adam Gopnik, Journalist
“This is a classic book and much less academically grounded than some of the others. But I think it’s still really important. It has been inspirational for me in a number of ways. I engage with my colleagues in labor economics a lot.” Read more...
Jake Rosenfeld, Sociologist
“This is a brilliant political polemic and a critique of the problematic effects of positive thinking. Ehrenreich argues, among other things, that the idea that nothing can go wrong is a terrible philosophy to adopt in the world of business.” Read more...
The best books on Happiness Through Negative Thinking
Oliver Burkeman, Journalist
“This is one of the most original and interesting books I’ve read in the last five years. Barbara Ehrenreich had written a book on war and got intrigued by the rituals and the group cohesion that results from war. So she wrote her next book on this human capacity and even need for group cohesion. What she found is that just about every society, at the time of Western contact, had some way of altering their bodies, and dancing around a fire or totemic object to some sort of rhythmic beat, music or a drum. Almost every traditional society had ways of using motion and music to bind themselves together and to achieve states of collective ecstasy. Europeans were generally disgusted by this, and tried to stamp it out as best they could. She shows how Christianity used to be a danced religion, but in the middle ages that got stamped out too. And what we’re left with is this rather dry and puritanical fear of ecstasy and loss of control.” Read more...
Jonathan Haidt, Psychologist
Interviews where books by Barbara Ehrenreich were recommended
The best books on Happiness, recommended by Jonathan Haidt
Most of us want to be happy, and yet it’s hard to achieve. Jonathan Haidt, psychologist and author of the classic The Happiness Hypothesis, talks us through five books, old and new, to better understand happiness.
The best books on Happiness Through Negative Thinking, recommended by Oliver Burkeman
You won’t become happy by trying to achieve happiness so why not embrace the full repertoire of human emotions? Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman recommends the best books on negative thinking.
The best books on Optimism, recommended by Elaine Fox
The psychologist and professor of cognitive neuroscience, Elaine Fox, reveals the benefits of positive thinking—if grounded in realism. Some of us may be genetically predisposed towards pessimism, but can overcome it.
-
1
The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It
by David Weil -
2
Why Wages Don't Fall During a Recession
by Truman F. Bewley -
3
Nickel and Dimed
by Barbara Ehrenreich -
4
The End of Loyalty: The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America
by Rick Wartzman -
5
Relational Inequalities: An Organizational Approach
by Donald Tomaskovic-Devey & Dustin Avent-Holt
The best books on Pay, recommended by Jake Rosenfeld
The best books on Pay, recommended by Jake Rosenfeld
Economists have tended to assume that the value of our personal contribution—our marginal product—largely determines what we get paid. In reality, there are many other factors involved that have nothing to do with our qualifications or personal performance. Here Jake Rosenfeld, Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St Louis, explains why it is that senior executive pay growth has shot up in recent decades and why, for workers at the bottom, it has flatlined.
The Best Essays: the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award, recommended by Adam Gopnik
Every year, the judges of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay search out the best book of essays written in the past year and draw attention to the author’s entire body of work. Here, Adam Gopnik, writer, journalist and PEN essay prize judge, emphasizes the role of the essay in bearing witness and explains why the five collections that reached the 2021 shortlist are, in their different ways, so important.
