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Sebastian Ritscher
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SQUEEZED

Alissa Quart

Why Our Families Can't Afford America

Squeezed weaves together intimate reporting with sharp and lively critique to show how the high cost of parenthood and our increasingly unstable job market have imploded the middle-class American Dream for many families, and offers surprising solutions for how we might change things.
Interlacing her own experience with close-up reporting on families that are just getting by, Quart reveals parenthood itself to be financially overwhelming, except for the wealthiest. She offers real solutions to these problems, including outlining necessary policy shifts, as well as detailing the DIY tactics some families are already putting into motion, and argues for the cultural reevaluation of parenthood and caregiving.

While Quart's reporting is U.S. focused, the issues she uncovers - the human struggles, the desire for stability and family - are not. The roots of these issues stretch across borders, and Quart cites countries that struggle alongside the U.S., and those who are a modeling a better way forward.

Written in the spirit of Barbara Ehrenreich and Jennifer Senior, SQUEEZED is an eye-opening page-turner. Powerfully argued, deeply reported, and ultimately hopeful, it casts a bright, clarifying light on families struggling to thrive in an economy that holds too few options. It will make readers think differently about their lives and those of their neighbors.

Alissa Quartis the executive editor of the journalism non-profit Economic Hardship Reporting Project. She co-founded its current incarnation with Barbara Ehrenreich. She writes the Outclassed column for The Guardian and has published features and reported commentary in many magazines and newspapers, most recently for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Nation and The New York Review of Books. In addition to the Columbia Journalism School's 2018 Alumni Award she has won the LA Press Club Award for Commentary, was a 2010 Nieman fellow at Harvard University, and has been nominated for an Emmy and a National Magazine Award.
Available products
Book

Published 2018-06-26 by Ecco

Book

Published 2018-06-26 by Ecco

Comments

Reminiscent of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed . . . will resonate with those feeling squeezed, and inform those who are not.

...offers excellent discussions of co-parenting, the problems facing immigrants, and the perils of enrolling in for-profit schools. Well-written, wide-ranging, and vital to understanding American life today.

Alissa Quart is a modern James Agee. Squeezed gets deep insidethe increasingly perilous financial lives of American families showing that they are collateral damage of our disappearing government. A damning,necessary and intensely vital book.

We are constantly told that America is the land where anyone can make it if they just work hard and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Squeezed, devastatingly exposes that lie by telling real, human stories. Teachers have to drive for hire in their off-hours, robots perform the labor of health-care workers, college professors with PhDs rely on food stamps, while big tech corporations rake in record profits by "innovating" us into a violent, modern-day caste system. Quart's investigation, written with the elegance of a literary novel, forces us to examine the grave consequences of an economic structure that has crushed the very people it claims are at the heart of the American dream.

Squeezed, like Nickel and Dimed . . . is worth reading if you're invested in better understanding poverty in America.

In a nation beset by income inequality and riven by social and cultural conflict, the traditional conception of the quiet contentment of middle-class American life appears to be on the wane. . . . Alissa Quart . . . lucidly demonstrates that for many, the dream of such satisfaction is increasingly out of reach.

"[Quart] shares familiar stories of economic frustration as well as hard evidence for the causes of it. It's an often tough but deeply empathetic call to action, one that exists in the real world of family, work, debt and even dreams.

A vivid prose stylist, Quart makes powerfully real what happens when those who were once middleclass can now only window shop for the American Dream. She also offers crucial collective plans to get us out of our anguishing binds.

If you've ever felt the pinch of financial anxietyand chances are you haveread this book now. Alissa Quart will help you realize that you're not alone and it's not your fault. Squeezed is profound, a sweeping, blistering portrait of hard-working people from all walks of life. It's a rousing wakeup call that also points the way forward to a more equitable, expansive future.

An eye-opening look at the forces that make it harder than ever for the middle class to survive.

Quart details the many ways in which our country has failed its middle-class families, and it's a necessary, if not at all feel-good, read. It's okay to feel angry after reading this. In fact, you should. Let this inspire you to protest the rampant inequality in this country, which is dooming millions of people to lives of desperation and destitution and despair.

In this highly thoughtful and compassionate account, [Quart] describes the forces that are making the traditional aspects of the "American Dream" out of reach for many Americans. . . . Well-written, wide-ranging, and vital to understanding American life today.

The issue is overwhelmingly structural and social, not individual or moral. We haven't failed; Capitalism has failed us. As Quart reminds her readerand as every story in the book is meant to illustratethe economic bind we find ourselves in cannot be solved by personal discipline or better financial decisions.

Chinese (simpl.): Imaginist ; Chinese (compl.): Gusa

It's not often that you can call a densely reported work of literary non-fiction about economic inequality a riveting page-turner, but Squeezed is just that. . . . a damning exposé of a deeply inequitable America.

Like Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, Squeezed is a thoughtful, enlightening and painful analysis of the ever-growing divide in the American economy.

On the day that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accomplished her remarkable victory in the Democratic primary . . . a new book arrived, as if by cosmic fiat, to help explain the emerging realignments of the political order. Squeezed examines the deteriorating fortunes of the middle-class[, illustrating] how life in a once-secure stratum has come to resemble the endlessly anxious existence of those in the rungs below.

INTERNATIONAL articles: Spanish: https://www.elconfidencial.com/alma-corazon-vida/2018-07-02/alissa-quart-precariedad-clase-media_1585005/ https://www.lavanguardia.com/vida/20180715/45912464278/el-hundimiento-de-la-clase-media.html Brazilian: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mercado/2018/07/livro-conta-historia-de-pioneiro-do-mercado-financeiro-no-brasil.shtml Dutch: https://fd.nl/opinie/1259479/amerika-degradeert

[Quart's] ambitious, top-tier reportage tells a powerful story of America today.

One of TIME's Best New Books to Read This Summer One of BITCH Magazine's 15 Books Feminists Should Read in June One of NYLON's 46 Great Books to Read This Summer One of NYLON's Great Books to Read This June Featured in LitHub's Ultimate Summer Books Preview PW Spring AnnouncementsTop 10 in Politics and Current Events Library JournalNon Fiction Picks for June 2018 One of Nylon's 50 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2018 The Week21 Books to Read in 2018

What Alissa Quart does so beautifully is weave together textured, compelling portraits of individual families with big ideas. Read this important book to understand the challenges your own family faces in parenting, housing, planning for the futureand read it to find out what to do about them!

Alissa Quart deftly chronicles the plight of Americans confronting the dangerous rise of Middle Class financial instability. The stories she passionately reports are heart-wrenching. They are also a clear warning that this nation is heading in a perilous direction. Squeezed is journalism at its best: exploratory, visceral, and searching for answers. An important work to which attention should and must be paid.

Quart is a sympathetic listener, getting people to reveal not just the tenuousness of their economic situations but also the turbulence of their emotional lives...We could all use her expert guidance through the maze.

Brillianta keen, elegantly written, and scorching account of the American family today. Through vivid stories, sharp analysis and wit, Quart anatomizes the middle class's fall while also offering solutions and hope.