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 world of the white-collar unemployed. Armed with a plausible resume of a professional "in transition," she attempts to land a "middle class job" undergoing career coaching and personality testing, then begins trawling a series of EST-like "boot camps," job fairs, "networking events," and evangelical job-search "ministries." She is proselytized, scammed, lectured and, again and again, rejected. Bait and Switch highlights the people who've done everything right-gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive resumes-yet have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster. Like the now classic Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch is alternately hilarious and tragic, a searing expose of economic cruelty where we least expect it.
Tony-nominated actress Anne Twomey has the perfect voice for Ehrenreich's prose. Funny, sarcastic, even angry, she's also feminine, charming. Published in 2001, Ehrenreich's bestseller NICKEL AND DIMED chronicled her adventures at the bottom of the pay scale. Here she changes her name and tries to get a middle-class job, but fails. "Hi, I'm Barbara Alexander," she learns to say, "and I'm a crackerjack PR person." No soap, although there are a great many people eager to sell her soap of their own. Those she encounters guide retail techniques, contacts, and perhaps most pernicious--attitude. They recommend a stance so cheerful and so slavish as to constitute a defeat much graver than unemployment. B.H.C. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of thirteen books, including The New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. A frequent contributor to Harper's and The Nation, she has been a regular columnist at The New York Times and Time magazine. She lives in Virginia.
