Money and Class in America

~
Penguin had a table at the book fair in New York City, and one of the books I bought was a collection called The Haves and Have-Nots: 30 Stories About Money and Class in America (edited by Barbara Solomon).

A couple of weeks ago, then, while I was still in the middle of The Haves and Have-Nots, I found a copy of The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. This is a compulsively readable book, and a video of the author discussing it can be found on the website for Simon & Schuster (simonsays.com) and apparently also on Amazon.

The Glass Castle has its dark moments, but in a larger sense it is about resilience, and what it means to be a parent, and the effect alcohol and other vices can have on a family. Again, too, it is about money and class in America.

When I finished it, I finally got a copy of a book I've been meaning to read since it was published in 2001, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich. I'd highly recommend this book, which is, to use one of the author's most poetic lines, about "the juxtaposition of terrible heat and cool, inaccessible water" (p. 88).