Had I Known, Barbara Ehrenreich
Had I Known, Barbara Ehrenreich
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Had I Known
Collected Essays

Author: Barbara Ehrenreich

Narrator: Suzanne Toren

Unabridged: 10 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Twelve

Published: 03/24/2020


Synopsis

Winner of the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, HAD I KNOWN contains the most provocative, incendiary, and career-making pieces by bestselling author, essayist, political activist, and "veteran muckraker" Barbara Ehrenreich (The New Yorker).

A self-proclaimed "myth buster by trade," Barbara Ehrenreich has covered an extensive range of topics as a journalist and political activist, and is unafraid to dive into intellectual waters that others deem too murky. Now, Had I Known gathers the articles and excerpts from a long-ranging career that most highlight Ehrenreich's brilliance, social consciousness, and wry wit.

From Ehrenreich's award-winning article "Welcome to Cancerland," published shortly after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, to her groundbreaking undercover investigative journalism in Nickel and Dimed, to her exploration of death and mortality in the New York Times bestseller, Natural Causes, Barbara Ehrenreich has been writing radical, thought-provoking, and worldview-altering pieces for over four decades. Her reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review, among others, while her essays, op-eds and feature articles have appeared in the New York Times, Harper's Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, Time, the Wall Street Journal, and many more. Had I Known pulls from the vast and varied collection of one of our country's most incisive thinkers to create one must-have volume.

About Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich is author of the 2002 New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. She has written nearly twenty books, and has been a columnist for Time magazine and the New York Times. She has contributed to The Progressive, Harpers, The Atlantic Monthly, Ms., The New Republic, Z Magazine, In These Times, and salon.com.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Paula on November 30, 2020

I love Barbara Ehrenreich, and while I haven't read all of her books, I've read most of them (my favorite being "Nickeled and Dimed") but NOT many of her published articles. So for me, this was mostly all new essays with which I was unfamiliar. Yes, they have all been published elsewhere, and yes th......more

Goodreads review by Aleksandra on March 16, 2024

Przyznaję bez bicia - nie czytałam wcześniej nic z tego, co napisała Barbara Ehrenreich, więc "Gdybym wiedziała", czyli zbiór najsłynniejszych esejów autorki stał się naturalnym pierwszym spotkaniem z jej twórczością. Teksty pisane na przestrzeni 40 lat, umieszczane w wielu czasopismach, dotykają ró......more

Goodreads review by Tanja on February 12, 2023

A collection of essays spanning about 30 years, on what is wrong with the United States of America. The author went on an experiment to live a month as a low-wage worker, for example. Not even then, in the 90’s, was it possible to get by on one minimum wage job. The minimum wage has not increased, b......more

Goodreads review by Rachel on August 11, 2020

I love Barbara Ehrenreich's writing. This collection obviously has that spark, but I did not love it. One, most of the pieces are seriously dated. They range from 1984 to 2017, with pretty even distribution over the years. Sometimes I barely remembered the then-current events she was writing about. Tw......more

Goodreads review by Katie on April 15, 2020

A great encapsulation of the incisive, skeptical, wry, wide-ranging writings of Barbara Ehrenreich. Essays in here range from the mid-1980s to 2018, and cover a lot of ground: poverty and wealth inequality in America, gender and social dynamics, religion and culture, and the insidious qualities of p......more


Quotes

“Barbara Ehrenreich has committed her life to writing in defense of women, immigrants, people of color, people in the LGBTQ+ community, people who are homeless, minimum-wage workers, and those who can’t even aspire to that luxury. Often prescient, her essays in this latest collection span several decades, explaining how we got to where we are today. A brave and brilliant thinker, she is most remarkable for reminding us how to be human in savage times. HAD I KNOWN is a dazzling tribute to Ehrenreich’s unwavering commitment to that cause, her mastery of craft, and an expansive and exceptional career centering on the art of the essay.”PEN Awards

"The strange and frightening world we suddenly find ourselves living in is one Ehrenreich has warned about for decades...Her scathing take feels all but prophetic now."—The Washington Post

"Ehrenreich's work is appealing for its fiery focus on social injustice... striking for [its] foresight...[and] a reminder that Ehrenreich's writing is just plain fun to read, thanks to her acerbic wit and spirited grumpiness."—GQ

"[HAD I KNOWN is] a one-stop shop for fans of Ehrenreich's gimlet eye and informed outrage...A rewarding, illuminating tour de force."—Booklist

"[Ehrenreich's] significant research is conveyed in a wry, taut polemical style...[She] chillingly foresaw the devastation of labor and the middle class...and the increased cruelty of law enforcement toward the vulnerable...With such relevance to fractured late-capitalist America, Ehrenreich's work warrants renewed attention."—Kirkus Reviews

this argumentative and passionate collection...challenges the status quo throughout, while also including a healthy dose of self-questioning. She is wittily satirical at times...and bitterly Swiftian at others. Gripping."—Publishers Weekly

PREVIOUS PRAISE FOR BARBARA EHRENREICH
"Ehrenreich's sharp and fearless take on mortality privileges joy over juice fasts and argues that, regardless of how many hours we spend in the gym, death wins out. An incisive, clear-eyed polemic, Natural Causes relaxes into the realization that the grim reaper is considerably less grim than a life spent in terror of a fate that awaits us all."—Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Evicted

"Throughout the text, [Ehrenreich] employs the erudition that earned her degree, the social consciousness that has long informed her writing, and the compassion that endears her to her many fans...A powerful text that floods the mind with illumination-and with agonizing questions."—Kirkus (starred review)

"The factor that makes each of [Barbara's] books so completely unique in American intellectual life is her persistent sensitivity to matters of social class. She can always see through the smokescreen, the cloud of fibs we generate to make ourselves feel better about a world where the work of the many subsidizes the opulent lifestyles of the few. That, plus the fact that she writes damned well. Better than almost anyone out there, in fact."—Salon

"Barbara Ehrenreich is a singular voice of sanity amid our national obsession with wellness and longevity. She is deeply well-informed about contemporary medical practices and their shortcomings, but she wears her learning lightly. Natural Causes is a delightful as well as an enlightening read. No one who cares about living (or dying) well can afford to miss it."—Jackson Lears, PhD, Editor in Chief of the Raritan Quarterly Review