Nickel and Dimed (2001) by Barbara Ehrenreich

 100 Best Books of the 21st Century: New York Times

Nickel and Dimed (2001)

by Barbara Ehrenreich

#57

   I actually remember the release of this book- I was surprised to find out it happened in the 21st century.  For me, one of the consequences of the rise of Trump has been a corresponding decline in the empathy in the real people depicted by Ehrenreich in this book: white, minimum-wage, poorly educated, with a myriad of health and housing issues.  These are, of course, Trump voters and it's hard for me to muster any kind of enthusiasm for their plight.   Ehrenreich spends each chapter in a different chapter: She starts in Florida, working in a restaurant and briefly, in a motel.  Then she moves to Maine- where she cleans houses in and around Portland.  She ends up in Minneapolis working in Walmart where she reveals that it was essentially impossible for her to get by on a minimum wage salary.

  In 2025, it is hard to imagine that anyone would feel bad for these future Trump supporters.  Ehrenreich is careful to keep her depictions positive- you don't hear any racist slurs or witness any of the kind of disgusting (spitting in customers food) type behavior that makes me reluctant to even eat at many sit down chain restaurants. 

  It's also worth noting that 25 years on and after eight years of Obama and four of Biden, no one has done anything to help these folks except by raising the minimum wage. It occurs to me that the best solution might be to hand the kitchen work and house cleaning over to robots and pay folks who can't hack it some kind of minimum amount of money to provide for food and housing.  The cost of shitty housing is one facet of Ehrenreich's poor people cos-play that stood out to me- because 25 years later it is still true.  Poor people often end up spending as much as a mortgage payment to stay by the day and week at SRO type motels and other temporary living arrangements which become permanent. 

  Surely, the need to provide more affordable housing options (or workforce housing, as they call it in some parts of the country) is a solution that all can agree upon.

Oromay (1983) by Baalu Girma

 Book Review

Oromay (1983)

by Baalu Girma

   Oromay is an Amharic language novel written by a member of the Ethiopian Communist elite circa 1980.  It proved, let us say, controversial in his native Ethiopia, where the Communist Derg were not known for their sense of humor, and where Girma was allegedly murdered by said Communist government of which he was a member.  Easy come, easy go! Oromay is about the lengthy, unsuccessful and ultimately pointless war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Historically, Eritrea was a province of the Ethiopian empire, and independence was tied to the Italian colonization of the area (the title of the novel is an Ethiopianisation of an Italian expression), but it was basically a decades long civil war that Ethiopia eventually lost.

   In this particular book, Girma covers one unsuccessful campaign among what had to be dozens, and adds an interesting entry to the shelf of books set in 20th century Communist dictatorships.  Honestly, the Ethiopian Communists don't sound half bad, so far as books like this one go.