Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century in Not Exceeding Ten Miles Square

Aug 16, 2018 ambyr rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: authorㅡfemale, characterㅡlgbt, book-club, protagonistㅡmultiple-genders, formatㅡaudiobook, characterㅡdisabled, genreㅡnonfiction, acquiredㅡfrom-work

While visiting my parents for Thanksgiving this year, I took an evening walk in a direction I don't usually go--and found a stretch of road lined for blocks and blocks with vans and RVers, settling in for the night. I think that was my first experience with the nomads Bruder talks about, with the vehicle-dwelling houseless--and so I was glad this book was in my queue, ready to give context to the phenomenon.

Bruder does illuminate the lives of vandwellers, sharing their personal stories and the r While visiting my parents for Thanksgiving this year, I took an evening walk in a direction I don't usually go--and found a stretch of road lined for blocks and blocks with vans and RVers, settling in for the night. I think that was my first experience with the nomads Bruder talks about, with the vehicle-dwelling houseless--and so I was glad this book was in my queue, ready to give context to the phenomenon.

Bruder does illuminate the lives of vandwellers, sharing their personal stories and the rhythms of life on the road for the migratory over-50 workforce who have become a backbone of seasonal jobs like Amazon warehouse picking, campground staffing, and sugar beet harvesting. She helps show them as people. But when it comes to the broader issues, the question of what drives some people to the road (and why others make other choices), she's frustratingly ready to make assumptions and extrapolations beyond her narrow sample set.

Race is discussed nowhere in the first 75% of the volume; when she does finally explicitly state what I already knew, that the population she was writing about was overwhelmingly white, she quotes Stuff White People Like as an explanation for why African Americans don't like camping and asks the white vandwellers whether they consider themselves racist (they don't), then shrugs and sets the issue aside. There's not even a token page spent considering what choices African Americans in similarly strained financial circumstances have open to them. They're not part of the Rubber Tramp tribe, so they're not relevant to the narrative--which I would accept if Bruder didn't keep trying to make generalizations about the future of the middle class as a whole.

The book is also frustratingly disorganized; there's a chapter about the closer of the gypsum mine in Empire, Nevada, that never seems to connect to much of anything else, and the final chapters end up focusing on Bruder to the expense of anyone else. I am glad she engaged in embedded journalism, living among her subjects and working the jobs they worked; I'm sure it gave her better understanding of their lives. But that's background research; it didn't, in my opinion, need to become part of the main narrative thread. I would have preferred an approach like Desmond's in Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, where discussion of the author's involvement and intervention is saved for the afterword.

Bruder's original article, The End of Retirement, is worth reading. It's not clear to me that this book has much to add to it. ...more

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Nov 18, 2018 DW Rowlands rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: category-pop-nonfic, topic-soc-wealth

Nomadland is a good book on a very important topic. I think that it could have been a great book, though, had the author approached it somewhat differently. The profiles of van-dwellers she spent time with were quite important for establishing an understanding of what these people's lives are like but, as a study of a phenomenon, they really needed a bit more quantitative backing.

I would have liked for Bruder to also have included a few chapters discussing in more detail the scale of the proble Nomadland is a good book on a very important topic. I think that it could have been a great book, though, had the author approached it somewhat differently. The profiles of van-dwellers she spent time with were quite important for establishing an understanding of what these people's lives are like but, as a study of a phenomenon, they really needed a bit more quantitative backing.

I would have liked for Bruder to also have included a few chapters discussing in more detail the scale of the problem of homelessness and van-dwelling among seniors, and of how common the different seasonal work and living situations are. I also would have liked a more-clear description of how typical the people she profiles are of the wider community that she observed.

Finally, I did feel that the book kind of read as a number of shorter articles stitched together. I think the narrative about the van-dwellers Bruder profiled would have been much more understandable if it had been chronological. However, each section seemed to start at a different point in time, often with a bit of repeating points that had already been made, in a way that felt like she wasn't sure her readers would have read the other articles. It left me with an overall rather confused understanding of people's timelines.

With all that said, the topic of this book was incredibly important, and quite disturbing. I hadn't really known anything about the van-dwelling subculture, or that it existed, though it seems a natural outgrowth of the fact that this country has a major problem with poverty among seniors and with homelessness due to the high cost of housing. I also hadn't really thought through all the difficulties and challenges that face people who are homeless but have vehicles: they're different from the challenges of the vehicle-less homeless, but still quite severe.

It was very troubling to learn how much employers take advantage of the social pressures on and cultural identities of older Americans to make it easier to economically exploit them. The emphasis that employers like Amazon put on older Americans' "Eisenhower-era work ethic" as a way to encourage them not to complain or think about the fact that they are doing a job where taking large numbers of painkillers is so essential to functioning that the employer hands them out for free upset me a lot. These companies are employing people to do dangerous jobs--that level of constant pain is almost certainly a sign that something is wrong--while paying them well below a living wage, and using propaganda to convince them that they should be proud of their willingness to work such jobs for so little pay.

Furthermore, the book certainly stressed me out by making me think of what may happen to me when I am in my forties or fifties if I lose whatever job I have then and can't replace it. Certainly, I won't have children or relatives to rely on, given that I'm not reproducing and have no siblings. I'm not at all convinced I'd be able to survive this sort of lifestyle, but I'm also terrified that the options available to me will be even worse than this. ...more

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Oct 22, 2020 Vipassana marked it as to-read

Shelves: non-fiction, check-library, politics-policy, economics, sociology

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Nov 28, 2018 kelly rated it really liked it · review of another edition

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