I completed the manuscript for Nickel and Dimed in a time of seemingly boundless prosperity. Nickel and Dimed was a classic among classics and so was she. I hope to return to this horror at TD in the near future.) (And by the way - Barbara would have been horrified! - the staff of Metropolitan Books, where I worked for years and which not only published Barbara’s work but many books I edited, as well as ones by Andrew Bacevich, Noam Chomsky, Edward Snowden, and so many other remarkable authors, has been laid off by its corporate owner, essentially doing in one of the great - and progressive - publishing houses of our time. I read it, gripped by Barbara’s remarkable account of another America, of her time working as a waitress, maid, and Walmart sales clerk among other poor-paying jobs, and returned it to Sara saying, as she reminded me recently, that I thought it would prove “a classic.” And whatever else I may have been wrong about in these years, I certainly wasn’t wrong about that. The head of the publishing house, my friend Sara Bershtel, handed it to me and asked me to tell her what I thought. Just one small memory: as the last century ended, I was working as an editor at a remarkable publishing house, Metropolitan Books, when the manuscript for Nickel and Dimed arrived on our doorstep. She wrote for TomDispatch for years and, in 2011, I posted this epilogue to the 10th anniversary edition of her famed book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, by which time it had already sold almost two million copies. As I’m sure most of you know by now, thanks to a wave of coverage - ranging from a New York Times obituary to a moving piece by Deirdre English, the former editor-in-chief of Mother Jones magazine - Barbara Ehrenreich died on September 1st at 81. It’s with both sadness and pleasure that I post this evening’s Best of TomDispatch piece.
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