Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Nomadland
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.jessicabruder.com/
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.jessicabruder.com/about-1/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Amherst College, B.A. (summa cum laude); Columbia Journalism School, M.S.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, journalist, editor, columnist, photojournalist, and educator. Oregonian, Portland, OR, staff writer; New York Observer, New York, NY, staff writer; Fortune Small Business, New York, senior editor. Columbia Journalism School, New York, adjunct professor of journalism, 2008—.
MEMBER:Phi Beta Kappa.
AWARDS:James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, 2015, for article “The End of Retirement;” Deadline Club Award; Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Center literary arts fellowship; Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship; Laura Ayres Snyder Poetry Prize, Amherst College; Alpha Delta Phi/David P. Patchel Memorial Fund Grant; recipient of support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including the Washington Post, Harper’s, Nation, New York Times Magazine, Christian Science Monitor, International Herald Tribune, O the Oprah Magazine, New York Times, and Inc. Journalist for news services, including the Associated Press and Reuters. Author of column, “START,” New York Times.
SIDELIGHTS
Jessica Bruder is a journalist, editor, photographer, and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. She is an adjunct professor of journalism at Columbia University. During her career, she has written for many prestigious newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Harper’s, Inc., Nation, International Herald Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times Magazine, and the Washington Post. She has also served as an editor for Fortune Small Business and as a staff writer at the Oregonian and the New York Observer. She earned a B.A. in English and French, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from Amherst College, and an M.S. in magazine writing from Columbia Journalism School.
Bruder is the author of Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man, an account of the origins and development of the well-known annual festival of community, art, and self-reliance that takes place in northwestern Nevada. Bruder examines how the festival was founded very modestly in 1986 and how it has grown to a massive yearly celebration that is punctuated by the burning of the famed effigy that gives the festival its name. She reports on how the Black Rock Desert of Nevada is turned into a large temporary city during the festival. She notes how the festival operates on a gift and barter economy. She describes the events of the festival, the types of people who attend Burning Man, and the social and cultural meaning of the celebration. The book includes more than 300 photographs that illustrate the celebration.
In her book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, Bruder recounts the results of spending some three years on the road in the United States, “documenting itinerant Americans who gave up traditional housing and hit the road full time, enabling them to travel from job to job and carve out a place for themselves in a precarious economy,” commented a writer on the Columbia Journalism School Website. During this period, she lived in a camper van and covered more than 15,000 miles from coast to coast and from northern to southern border.
The narrative covers a category of workers who, in many ways, represent a category of the American workforce that is becoming more and more common. These “workampers” are often older individuals who have lost regular jobs, or found themselves in a financial crisis, who have health issues, or who have otherwise been unable to secure regular employment. They travel from job to job, following seasonal employment in agriculture or with large companies such as Amazon that have a large increase in orders during the holidays. They live in campers or recreational vehicles, or sometimes in their cars, and gather together in mobile communities that offer support for each other. Bruder clearly shows how they manage to eke out an existence in extremely difficult conditions, where a mechanical breakdown of transportation or an extended illness could mean disaster.
Bruder is fully immersed in the lives of the people she reports on. She “goes gonzo with simple, open transparency, letting the reader know when she’s intruded on the narrative, and why, and then using her proximity to the story to tease out the meaning behind the reporting,” observed Janet Saidi, writing in the Christian Science Monitor. “Structurally, the analysis comes first; this is a solid work of reporting, not yet another memoir documenting a weird one-off personal experiment,” Saidi further remarked.
Booklist reviewer Connie Fletcher called Nomadland a “powerhouse of a book” that delivers “Visceral and haunting reporting.” Janet Ingraham Dwyer, writing in Library Journal, found the book to be a “must-read that is simultaneously hopeless and uplifting and certainly unforgettable.” Bruder’s account is “Engaging, highly relevant immersion journalism,” stated a Kirkus Reviews writer. A Publishers Weekly contributor concluded that Bruder “conveys the phenomenon’s human element, making this sociological study intimate, personal, and entertaining.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, July 1, 2017, Connie Fletcher, review of Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, p. 4.
Christian Science Monitor, December 11, 2017, Janet Saidi, “Nomadland Chronicles Americans on the Move with Heaps of Reportorial Detail, Narrative Flair,” review of Nomadland.
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2017, review of Nomadland.
Library Journal, July 1, 2017, “Social Science,” Janet Ingraham Dwyer, review of Nomadland, p. 92.
Minneapolis Star Tribune, September 22, 2017, Kim Ode, review of Nomadland.
New York Times Book Review, September 19, 2017, Parul Sehgal, “On the Road with the Casualties of the Great Recession,” review of Nomadland.
Publishers Weekly, May 29, 2017, review of Nomadland, p. 54.
Washington Post Book World, October 13, 2017, Timothy R. Smith, “Book World: ‘The Last Free Space in America Is a Parking Spot:’ On the Road with a New Kind of Workforce,” review of Nomadland.
ONLINE
Columbia Journalism School Website, http://journalism.columbia.edu/ (April 8, 2018), biography of Jessica Bruder.
Jessica Bruder Website, http://www.jessicabruder.com (April 8, 2018).
Joy Harris Literary Agency Website, http://www.joyharrisliterary.com/ (April 8, 2018), biography of Jessica Bruder.
Jessica Bruder
Adjunct Faculty
Expertise: Writing
Jessica Bruder is a journalist who reports on subcultures, economic justice and social issues.
For her most recent book, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (W.W. Norton & Co.), she spent months living in a camper van, documenting itinerant Americans who gave up traditional housing and hit the road full time, enabling them to travel from job to job and carve out a place for themselves in a precarious economy. The project spanned three years and more than 15,000 miles of driving—from coast to coast and from Mexico to the Canadian border.
Bruder has written for publications including Harper's Magazine, The Nation, The Washington Post, The New York Times Magazine, The Associated Press, The International Herald Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, O: The Oprah Magazine, Inc. Magazine, Reuters and CNNMoney.com. She has worked as a staff writer at The Oregonian and The New York Observer and a senior editor at Fortune Small Business magazine. Starting in 2004, Bruder was a regular contributor to The New York Times, where she became the founding columnist behind START (link is external), a blog profiling socially innovative startups.
Her long-form magazine stories have won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism and a Deadline Club Award. Support for her projects has come from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center, where she was a 2016 literary arts fellow.
Bruder is also the author of Burning Book (link is external) (Simon & Schuster), a narrative non-fiction exploration of the annual Burning Man festival that the Los Angeles Times (link is external)called “quietly poetic.”
Bruder earned her bachelor’s degree summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst College, where she won the school's Laura Ayres Snyder Poetry Prize and an Alpha Delta Phi/David P. Patchel Memorial Fund grant to study censorship in South Africa. She went on to receive a master’s degree at the Columbia Journalism School as co-valedictorian of her class, winning a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship.
Bruder has been teaching at the journalism school since 2008.
jessicabruder.com (link is external)
Contact
Email: jlb2102@columbia.edu (link sends e-mail)
Twitter: @JessBruder (link is external)
Jessica Bruder is a journalist whose work focuses on subcultures and unexplored corners of the economy. She currently lives part-time in a 1996 camper van named Halen, collecting stories for a book about nomadic Americans that is forthcoming from W.W. Norton & Co. The project is based on “The End of Retirement,” her Harper’s Magazine cover feature that won the 2015 Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism.
Previously Bruder was the author of Burning Book (Simon & Schuster), about the annual Burning Man festival, which The Los Angeles Times called “quietly poetic.” She has also written for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Observer, the Associated Press, The Oregonian, The International Herald Tribune, Inc. Magazine and O, the Oprah Magazine. She has been an adjunct professor at Columbia’s Journalism School for seven years and, when she’s not on the road, makes her home in Brooklyn with Max the spaniel.
Jessica Bruder is a journalist who reports on subcultures and economic justice.
For her recent book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (W.W. Norton & Co.), she spent months living in a camper van, documenting itinerant Americans who gave up traditional housing and hit the road full time, enabling them to travel from job to job and carve out a place for themselves in our precarious economy. The project spanned three years and more than 15,000 miles of driving—from coast to coast and from Mexico to the Canadian border.
Jessica has been teaching at Columbia Journalism School since 2008. She has written for publications including Harper's Magazine, The Nation, WIRED, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The International Herald Tribune, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The Christian Science Monitor, O: The Oprah Magazine, Inc. Magazine, Reuters and CNNMoney.com, along with The Oregonian and The New York Observer — where she worked as a staff writer — and Fortune Small Business magazine, where she was a senior editor. Her long-form stories have won a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism and a Deadline Club Award.
A longtime contributor to The New York Times, Jessica has written more than 120 bylined stories for the newspaper and was the columnist behind START, a NYT blog profiling socially innovative startups. Before that, she was the editor of CNNMoney's Innovation Nation column, spotlighting ventures that aimed to benefit people and the planet.
Jessica is also the author of Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man (Simon & Schuster). (The first stop on that book's reading tour got listed in The New Yorker. Her mom totally freaked out about it.) Her documentary photography appears in both Burning Book and Nomadland, and has also run in The New York Times, The New York Observer and Blender magazine.
She's been interviewed about her work on radio shows including NPR's "All Things Considered," "On Point" and "Here and Now," along with WNYC's "Leonard Lopate Show," CBC's "Q" arts and culture program, and KCRW's "Press Play With Madeleine Brand," and on such television programs as MSNBC'S "The Cycle" and Al Jazeera's "The Stream." Her projects have received support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center, where she was a 2016 literary arts fellow. This spring, she will be a resident fellow at Yaddo.
Jessica holds a B.A. in English and French from Amherst College, summa cum laude, and an M.S. in magazine writing from Columbia Journalism School, where she was co-valedictorian of her class and won a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship.
She lives in Brooklyn, New York with a dog named Max and more plants than you can shake a leafy stick at.
Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century
Connie Fletcher
Booklist. 113.21 (July 1, 2017): p4+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century.
By Jessica Bruder.
Sept. 2017. 320p. illus. Norton, $26.95 (97803932493161.331.5.
What photographer Jacob Riis did for the tenement poor in How the Other Half Lives (1890) and what novelist Upton Sinclair did for stockyard workers in The Jungle (1906), journalist Bruder now does for a segment of today's older Americans forced to eke out a living as migrant workers. There is "no rest for the aging," says Bruder, underscoring her I focus on people, primarily near or past retirement, whose lives and expectations were upended by the 2008 recession. This powerhouse of a book grew out of Bruder's article, "The End of Retirement," published in Harper's in 2014. She examines the phenomenon of a new tribe of down-and-outers--"workampers," or "houseless" people--who travel the country in vans as they follow short-term jobs, such as harvesting sugar beets, cleaning campsites and toilets in wilderness parks, and stocking and plucking merchandise from bins at an Amazon warehouse, averaging 15 miles a shift walking the facility's concrete floors. Bruder spent three years shadowing and interviewing members of this "new kind of wandering tribe." In the best immersive-journalism tradition, Bruder records her misadventures driving and living in a van and working in a beet field and at Amazon. Tying together the book is the story of Linda May, a woman in her sixties who takes on crushing jobs with optimistic aplomb. Visceral and haunting reporting.--Connie Fletcher
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Fletcher, Connie. "Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century." Booklist, 1 July 2017, p. 4+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499862622/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=58cc2cb4. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499862622
Social science
Library Journal. 142.12 (July 1, 2017): p92+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Bruder, Jessica. Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. Norton. Sept. 2017.320p. photos. notes. ISBN 9780393249316. $26.95; ebk. ISBN 9780393249323. POL SCI
What do you do when your mortgage is underwater, when a divorce or medical catastrophe depletes your savings, or when your anticipated retirement becomes financially impossible? A growing number of Americans address these crushing challenges by taking to the road, with an RV, van, or even a small car as their permanent home. Journalist Bruder joined these contemporary nomads, known as van-dwellers or "workampers." She closely follows Linda, in her mid-60s and traveling between jobs at an Amazon warehouse and a park campground. Linda and her growing "vanily" (van-dweller family) run the gamut of ages and backstories, though there is a preponderance of older people who are unable to retire and work physically strenuous, low-wage jobs to get by. Bruder touches on the deep social stigma of homelessness (van-dwellers fiercely reject that description), the surprisingly short history of the concept of retirement, the rarity of van-dwellers of color, and strategies for docking in plain sight in urban areas and finding a safe haven in rural areas. The people she meets exhibit pride, grit, resourcefulness, resilience, and, profoundly, the elation of freedom mingled with the terror of being one mechanical breakdown away from ruin. VERDICT A must-read that is simultaneously hopeless and uplifting and certainly unforgettable.--Janet Ingraham Dwyer, State Lib. of Ohio, Columbus
Moss, Jeremiah. Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul. Dey St: HarperCollins. Jul. 2017.480p. illus. notes. bibliog. index. ISBN 9780062439697. $28.99; ebk. ISBN 9780062439703. SOC SCI
In his first book, blogger Moss (vanishing-newyork.blogspot.com) explicitly states his bias toward the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Manhattan. He says at the outset that he doesn't consider the other parts of New York to be real, setting up his own classism and making readers perceive the inclusion of Harlem (and the South Bronx) to be tokenism at worst. Gentrification cannot easily be covered in its entirety, even within the borders of the five boroughs (Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island) and focusing on his favorite neighborhoods could have worked it Moss had better contextualized them. The author effectively distills the histories of neighborhoods he knows well, particularly those of lower Manhattan, and he explains some of the more recent shifting class conflicts. Yet, he does not include people impacted by hypergentrification, who live in "not New York," places such as the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island. His research is lightweight and, unfortunately, he quotes from other news stories instead of speaking directly to residents of the neighborhoods covered. VERDICT Point patrons to WNYC's eight-part radio series about gentrification in Brooklyn instead.--Candice Kail, Columbia Univ. Libs., New York
Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment. Pantheon. Jul. 2017. 352p. ed. by Angela J. Davis. illus. notes. bibliog. ISBN 9781101871270. $27.95; ebk. ISBN 9781101871287. SOC SCI
In the introduction to these new essays, Davis (law, American Univ.; Arbitrary Justice) states that the media has made the American public real-time witnesses to the country's chronic and systemic violence against black males. Davis, along with 13 other criminal justice experts, advance critical understanding to combat and correct structural racism and advocate for justice and peace. They suggest that, although the evidence is now readily available, targeted brutality is hardly new as it perpetuates what black people have endured and continue to live with following the legacy of slavery and the racialized criminal justice system. Policing propagates that legacy through policies and practices of racial profiling. Further, implicit bias from chronic presumption of guilt reaches beyond policing to disparate prosecuting of black males, as several contributors demonstrate. The essayists offer more than indictments, however. Almost all move beyond calls for reform to respond with practical suggestions for change to make black lives truly matter. VERDICT For general readers, students, and experts alike, these essays provide much-needed data, analysis, and insights into the disparities throughout U.S. society and its criminal justice system. [See Prepub Alert, 2/13/17.]--Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe
Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth. Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. Dey St: HarperCollins. May 2017. 354p. illus. notes. index. ISBN 9780062390851. $27.99; ebk. ISBN 9780062390875. SOC SCI
"Fake news" may be the current buzz words, but personal truths have never been so tangible thanks to data scientists. Stephens-Davidowitz (former Google data scientist and current New York Times columnist) unpacks this telling data, explaining exactly how people lie every day. Mining data from Google Searches to niche sites such as PornHub, it becomes quickly evident that digital data reveals more human truths than any formally conducted survey. Be warned; some of this information may be disturbing as there is no doctoring the digital accuracy when it comes to queries on sex, race, gender, and politics. These hidden revelations shed light on the potential for even deeper exploration of the human psyche as more academics embrace the use of Big Data for research. After reading this pivotal work, personal Google searches will never be the same. As for our author, he is banking that human curiosity outweighs self-censor for he has more big lies to explore. VERDICT A book for those who are intensely curious about human nature, informational analysis, and amusing anecdotes to the tune of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's Freakanomics.--Angela Forret, Clive P.L., IA
Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation. Penguin Pr. Sept. 2017.352p. ed. by John Freeman. ISBN 9780143131038. pap. $17; ebk. ISBN 9781524704827. SOC SCI
In this collection of essays, stories, and poems from some of today's most influential writers, Freeman (How To Read a Novelist) provides an examination of the social structure of the United States. Considered are issues such as homelessness, income disparity, racism, and the politics of immigration. Particularly striking is an assessment of the homeless crisis by novelist Karen Russell, which questions the compassion of our society toward those in need. A haunting tale by author Anthony Doerr about finding a man asleep in a car in his driveway is a soul-searching account of whom we fear and why. Journalist Sarah Smarsh writes a disturbing report of how the purchasing of plasma from the marginalized has become a billion dollar high-priced pharmaceuticals industry. Several works address the plight of immigrants and minorities, including an unsettling work by poet Natalie Diaz, which considers the high death rate of Native Americans owing to violence. VERDICT Although at times heavy-going, these carefully selected pieces offer a thought-provoking compilation that one will consider long after turning the last page.--Mary Jennings, Camano Island Lib., WA
* Yamashita, Karen Tei. Letters to Memory. Coffee House. Sept. 2017.160p. illus. ISBN 9781566894876. pap. $19.95. SOC SCI
When the United States imprisoned Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II, the circumstances changed the lives of more than 100,000 U.S. citizens, profoundly impacting future generations. In her first work of nonfiction, novelist Yamashita (literature, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz; I Hotel) uses her family's letters, sermons, and photographs to come to terms with this period's impact on both her family and American society as a whole. Told in a series of letters from Yamashita to fictionalized academics, the book muses on the value of debt, forgiveness, civil rights, and love to a family after the trust between country and citizen has been broken. Instead of dwelling on the injustice that befell her parents' community, Yamashita focuses on her father's rebuilding of his parish and her community finding a way forward through tragedy. VERDICT While this account may provide context for some of the themes found in Yamashita's fiction, the author's personal reflections on a dark period of American history will resonate with a larger audience concerned with how some U.S. organizations have targeted specific communities.--John Rodzvilla, Emerson Coll., Boston
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Social science." Library Journal, 1 July 2017, p. 92+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497612731/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=606230f9. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A497612731
Bruder, Jessica: NOMADLAND
Kirkus Reviews. (June 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Bruder, Jessica NOMADLAND Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 9, 26 ISBN: 978-0-393-24931-6
Journalist Bruder (Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man, 2007) expands her remarkable cover story for Harper's into a book about low-income Americans eking out a living while driving from locale to locale for seasonal employment.From the beginning of her immersion into a mostly invisible subculture, the author makes it clear that the nomads--many of them senior citizens--refuse to think of themselves as "homeless." Rather, they refer to themselves as "houseless," as in no longer burdened by mortgage payments, repairs, and other drawbacks, and they discuss "wheel estate" instead of real estate. Most of them did not lose their houses willingly, having fallen victim to mortgage fraud, job loss, health care debt, divorce, alcoholism, or some combination of those and additional factors. As a result, they sleep in their cars or trucks or cheaply purchased campers and try to make the best of the situation. At a distance, the nomads might be mistaken for RV owners traveling the country for pleasure, but that is not the case. Bruder traveled with some of the houseless for years while researching and writing her book. She builds the narrative around one especially accommodating nomad, senior citizen Linda May, who is fully fleshed on the page thanks to the author's deep reporting. May and her fellow travelers tend to find physically demanding, low-wage jobs at Amazon.com warehouses that aggressively seek seasonal workers or at campgrounds, sugar beet harvest sites, and the like. The often desperate nomads build communities wherever they land, offering tips for overcoming common troubles, sharing food, repairing vehicles, counseling each other through bouts of depression, and establishing a grapevine about potential employers. Though very little about Bruder's excellent journalistic account offers hope for the future, an ersatz hope radiates from within Nomadland: that hard work and persistence will lead to more stable situations. Engaging, highly relevant immersion journalism.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Bruder, Jessica: NOMADLAND." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A493329232/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9fc351d7. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A493329232
Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century
Publishers Weekly. 264.22 (May 29, 2017): p54.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century
Jessica Bruder. Norton, $26.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-393-24931-6
Journalist Bruder (Burning Book) expands on an article originally published in Harper's where she examined the phenomenon of aging Americans adjusting to an economic climate in which they can't afford to retire. Many among them have discarded "stick and brick" traditional homes for "wheel estate" in the form of converted vans and RVs and have formed a nomadic culture of "workampers," evoking the desperate resourcefulness of those who lived through the Great Depression. Bruder follows her subjects as they harvest sugar beets, work at Amazon fulfillment centers during the holidays, and act as campground hosts. She conducts extensive interviews, attends the workampers' gatherings, and tests out survival tips, to the point where she makes "houselessness"--a lifestyle born out of necessity and compromise--seem like a new form of freedom, with its own kind of appeal. Of course, she also addresses the often-crushing financial and social circumstances in which these people live, and pointedly touches on the racial considerations that make this nomadic lifestyle a predominantly white trend. Tracing individuals throughout their journeys from coast to coast, Bruder conveys the phenomenon's human element, making this sociological study intimate, personal, and entertaining, even as the author critiques the economic factors behind the trend. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary Agency. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century." Publishers Weekly, 29 May 2017, p. 54. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494500738/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ba497257. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A494500738
'Nomadland' chronicles Americans on the move with heaps of reportorial detail, narrative flair
Janet Saidi
The Christian Science Monitor. (Dec. 11, 2017): Arts and Entertainment:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Full Text:
Byline: Janet Saidi
In Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, writer Jessica Bruder is pursuing a moving target: the new class of Americans who have traded in real estate for "wheel estate," having lost their mortgages, their savings, and their dreams in the Great Recession or individual disasters, to become "workampers." This tribe pulls into campgrounds, back roads, and parking lots, working temporary minimum-wage-variety jobs that sometimes come with a campsite. They live out of houses that move: fitted-out RVs, trailers, trucks, vans, even cars.
Bruder tackles her task with heaps of reportorial detail and narrative flair. First she hits us with the facts: "As I write this, there are only a dozen counties and one metro area in America where a full-time minimum wage worker can afford a one-bedroom apartment at fair market rent," Bruder writes.
She reports on the exact costs of the RV and makeshift vans we encounter; how to set up a 100-watt solar panel in a rigged-out van; how much the bargain breakfast costs at the local diner; and how much it costs to get a shower at a truck stop. She reports exactly how many RV parks there are in Quartzite, Ariz. and how much it costs to camp there and where to "boondock," or camp without amenities, on public land outside of town. She "FOIAs" (submits a Freedom of Information Act request to) the US Forest Service.
But while her prices and statistics punctuate the narrative, Bruder also manages to tap into the spiritual, the metaphorical, and the hopeful.
"As I write it is autumn. Soon winter will come," she says. "Routine layoffs will start at the seasonal jobs. The nomads will pack up camp and return to their real home - the road - moving like blood cells through the veins of the country.... All will count the miles, which unspool like a film strip across America."
On this journey, readers get to know characters like Charlene Swankie or "Swankie Wheels," generous Silvianne the astrologer, and Linda May, who dreams of buying a piece of land and building an Earthship house for herself in Arizona's dangerous desert country. (There are also former accountants, insurance executives, corporate vice presidents, and community college teachers, living on the move.)
And we get to know their world - a world with its own language, its own landscapes, and its own networks. There's GTGs, or get-togethers like the RTR, "Rubber Tramp Rendezvous." There's The Q, for Quartzite, Ariz., and CamperForce, Amazon's branded seasonal-employment initiative, and boondocking, or van-living off the grid. And there's the cyber world: an entire boondocking-bloggers network; the "vandwellers" thread on Reddit, the app that identifies friendly Walmart parking lots.
All of this, writes Bruder, is a remarkable bid to "transcend - the fraying social order" by people who have been let down by it, rebuilding their own "parallel world on wheels."
But transcendence can be exhausting. It's tempting to see the road-tripping lifestyle as part of a great American tradition (and some of these places also inspired John Steinbeck).
But perhaps promoting and mythologizing our way out of difficulties is a less-productive American tradition. Through slogans like "Work hard. Have fun. Make history." and newsletters with tips and information about its seasonal "CamperForce," Bruder reports that Amazon attracts hundreds (possibly thousands) of workers in its warehouses for strenuous, repetitive seasonal factory work. She describes an Amazon handout telling workers to expect to lift up to 50 pounds in 90-degree heat, while newsletters provide endless tips on avoiding injury and invites workampers to the "Hard Times" Depression-era themed dance.
Is this American resilience, or American denial? Bruder doesn't shrink from the question:
"The truth was much more nuanced," she writes, "but how could I access it?"
Bruder's answer is to outfit a van named Halen and go on the road. The result is this up-close look at the workampers, their world, and what this moment says about America.
In Halen, Bruder spends three winter seasons and two years with the workampers. And when Linda May finally buys her parcel of desert but can't afford to take off work even long enough to visit the site, Bruder steps in. Armed with water, sunblock, a cell phone, a laptop, and GPS, she heads out to the remote site and walks the property with Linda joining her by Skype until the heat shuts her laptop down.
Bruder goes gonzo with simple, open transparency, letting the reader know when she's intruded on the narrative, and why, and then using her proximity to the story to tease out the meaning behind the reporting.
Eventually, she also takes a lot of showers in truck stops.
"When I was in Halen," Bruder writes, "my address was everywhere. I slept at Flying J truck stops, Walmart Supercenters, a casino called Whiskey Pete's, an abandoned gas station, barren deserts, mountain wildernesses, suburban streets.... Experiences like these were the background music to my reporting this book."
Structurally, the analysis comes first; this is a solid work of reporting, not yet another memoir documenting a weird one-off personal experiment. But, one of the most intriguing paragraphs in the book is a footnote describing how Bruder scored her first truck-stop shower for free. Readers might come away with a longing to hear more about Bruder's experiences and to share the revelations and growth involved in the journey from her viewpoint.
Ultimately, that viewpoint is a refreshingly optimistic one, even amidst the bleak analysis. Bruder not only writes what she sees, but she eloquently makes some sense of it.
"As much as food or shelter," she writes, "we require hope. And there is hope on the road."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Saidi, Janet. "'Nomadland' chronicles Americans on the move with heaps of reportorial detail, narrative flair." Christian Science Monitor, 11 Dec. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A518418457/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2ae8ba06. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A518418457
Book World: 'The last free space in America is a parking spot': On the road with a new kind of workforce
Timothy R. Smith
The Washington Post. (Oct. 13, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Timothy R. Smith
Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century
By Jessica Bruder
Norton. 273 pp. $26.95
---
In July, I quit my job of nearly eight years with The Washington Post to live in a van and pursue freedom and solitude. I'd settled $35,000 in credit card debt and left work on my own terms.
A month into the trip, I learned how lucky I was. I met a 62-year-old man named Pete at a Michigan state park who'd lost his job and his home. He lived out of a car, too, but not by choice. Even though his bed was a back seat, he remained optimistic: "It'll get better, it always does," he told me.
In her devastating, revelatory book "Nomadland," Jessica Bruder documents people like Pete, one of tens of thousands of dispossessed Americans who live itinerant lives in search of seasonal work and affordable rent.
Seventeen years into the 21st century, the news for the middle class is bleak. As one expert puts it in the book, the "three-legged stool" of retirement security - Social Security, private pensions and personal savings - has given way to "a pogo stick," with Social Security as the single "wobbly" leg. As the election made clear, the erosion of factory work is taking its toll on many Americans. These days, many decent jobs are in cities with absurdly high rents.
Caught in this trap are what Bruder calls "downwardly mobile older Americans." Millions are facing the largest reversal in retirement security in American history. "Nearly half of middle-class workers may be forced to live on a food budget of as little as $5 a day when they retire," Bruder notes.
Some Americans have decided to scrap the house to become workampers - working while living out of an RV or a tent - because, as Bruder notes, "the last free place in America is a parking spot."
Workampers sort sugar beets, pick strawberries, maintain campsites or stock shelves at Amazon warehouses. (Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.) It's backbreaking, poorly paid work without benefits. Amazon's CamperForce program, for example, hires legions of seasonal workers - most of whom live out of their vehicles - ahead of Christmas and cuts the positions when the holiday ends.
"Nomadland's" central character is Linda May, a 64-year-old grandmother who's worked an assortment of jobs through her life: as a cigarette girl at a casino, managing a carpet and tile shop in Arizona, as a Home Depot cashier. When we meet May, she's working as a campground host, checking in campers, shoveling out the ashen remains of fire rings and cleaning toilets.
"Her options for work would dwindle with age, rather than broadening to reflect her years of experience," Bruder writes. "There seemed to be no way off the treadmill of low-wage jobs."
Despite the hardships and her meager income, May is ebullient, speaking in exclamation points. "Hell-ooo-ooo!" is her usual greeting. An indomitable spirit, she's the perfect choice for Bruder to follow. Her dream is to build a self-sustaining solar-powered "earthship" made of recycled materials in the deserts of the Southwest. Bruder helps her survey land to build it.
We also encounter, at various campsites, a Muslim man who lost his halal goat farm and parks his van in the direction of Mecca; a nudist bookseller; and a transgender young man. Most are upbeat and optimistic. They find strength in one another and build lasting friendships. Some have a more sober view of their circumstances. One aging man has an especially grim retirement plan: When he's too infirm to work, he'll walk into the woods and shoot himself.
Bruder, who teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, writes in an evenhanded, impartial tone, avoiding polemicism. She does, however, insert herself into the narrative, sometimes intrusively.
Bruder buys a van (and names it Halen, after the band Van Halen). She describes being awoken by a police officer and frigid nights that freeze fluids in the van's piping. She works at a sugar beet factory in North Dakota. It's grinding work, and she flops in bed sore and weary after a 12-hour day. While she felt some necessity to "tough it out," she quits after a few days.
"No matter how long I stayed, the experience wasn't going to anneal me into the ranks of real workampers - I'd be going home at the end of it all to write."
Her instinct to get out of the way is wise. The people she meets and the stories they tell are powerful in their own right. For instance, Bruder meets an older couple at the beet factory: He lost his job as a Walmart truck driver; she was recently diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, and had to stop working. It's a devastating tale that Bruder could have explored more thoroughly.
When Bruder does stand aside, "Nomadland" soars. Her subjects are self-sufficient, proud people. Many in their 60s and beyond, they should be entering Shakespeare's sixth age of man, "into the lean and slippered pantaloon/With spectacles on nose and pouch/On side." Instead they are sans homes, sans money, sans security, sans everything, except their dignity and self-reliance.
---
Smith, a former staff member of Washington Post Book World, is a nomad who occasionally lives out of his van.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Smith, Timothy R. "Book World: 'The last free space in America is a parking spot': On the road with a new kind of workforce." Washington Post, 13 Oct. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509394461/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f973e981. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509394461
On the Road With the Casualties of the Great Recession
Books of The Times
By PARUL SEHGAL SEPT. 19, 2017
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Linda May with her dog, Coco. Credit Jessica Bruder
As far as human inventions go, retirement is shockingly recent, and proving fragile. A fringe idea until the 20th century — and one that outraged many — it took tenuous hold in the United States in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. Today, only 17 percent of Americans imagine they will be able to afford to stop working someday.
“Nomadland,” by Jessica Bruder, an important if frustrating new work influenced by such classics of immersion journalism as Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed,” looks at one strategy older workers have devised for “surviving America.”
Tens of thousands have traded in their homes for “wheel estate.” They are “the Okies of the Great Recession”: grandparents living in school buses and vans seeking seasonal work cleaning toilets at campgrounds, picking blueberries in Kentucky, sometimes for wages, sometimes for just a parking spot — “not necessarily paved but hopefully level.”
For three years and 15,000 miles, Bruder traveled and worked alongside them, taking a job at a sugar beet processing facility and at an Amazon warehouse. “I felt like I was wandering around post-recession refugee camps,” she writes. “At other moments, I felt like I was talking to prison inmates. It was tempting to cut through the pleasantries and ask, ‘What are you in for?’ ”
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Credit Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times
They’re in for chronic illness, divorce, bad investments — ordinary life. Bruder meets a software executive who lost everything in the market crash of 2008; accomplished women in their 50s who have already aged out of the job market; a former community college teacher in his 70s who has worked at a Christmas tree lot, cutting and carrying 9-foot-tall trees up to 10 hours a day, six days a week.
Bruder’s main subject is Linda May, a 64-year-old former cocktail waitress, trucker and insurance executive who has taken to the open road with a tiny lemon-colored trailer, which she calls the Squeeze Inn. (“Yeah, there’s room, squeeze in” is the joke.) Terrible puns for vehicles abound; it’s a tradition among the “workampers,” as they call themselves. Bruder comes across Vansion, Van Go and Vanna White. She names her own Halen.
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May is a resourceful and hard worker — and incorrigibly cheerful (she actually wears glasses with rose-colored frames). Nothing brings her down, not running low on food, not getting locked out of the Squeeze Inn. It’s a steely positivity Bruder finds alarming and deeply American, and one that she encounters repeatedly. In a Facebook group for Amazon warehouse workers, a member enthuses, “It’s easy to lose weight by walking a half marathon every day. Bonus: you’re too tired to eat!”
“Nomadland” is part of a fleet of recent books about the gig economy. More than most, it’s able to comfortably contain various contradictions: “The nomads I’d been interviewing for months were neither powerless victims nor carefree adventurers,” Bruder writes. Their lives are shown to be harsh and exhilarating, lonely and full of community. They swap tips for finding cheap dental care and “stealth parking”; they congregate at the “Rubber Tramp Rendezvous,” a kind of Burning Man for the elderly, mobile set. “When someone’s van breaks down, they pass the hat,” Bruder writes. “Around a shared campfire, in the middle of the night, it can feel like a glimpse of utopia.”
There’s always less romance by daylight, though. Amazon is one of the largest employers of the workampers — and the most notorious. Incentivized by federal tax credits for employing elderly workers (25 to 40 percent of wages), the company aggressively recruits them, especially during the holiday season. Jeff Bezos has predicted that a quarter of all workampers will pass through his warehouses, working 10 hours or more a day, sorting packages.
Photo
Jessica Bruder Credit Todd Gray
It’s crippling work. The workampers’ RVs look like “mobile apothecaries,” Bruder writes. Amazon’s warehouses feature wall-mounted dispensers of free painkillers. America runs on ibuprofen; it’s the performance drug of the new economy.
Most infamously, on a sweltering day in 2011, managers at an Amazon warehouse in Pennsylvania refused to open the loading doors to cool down the building (they were worried about theft). Instead, Bruder reports, they arranged for paramedics to wait outside, on call, to wheel out workers who became too sick to work. All those sent home, it was later reported, were disciplined for it.
Bruder is a poised and graceful writer. But her book is plagued by odd evasions. Take race, the major one. She writes that “there is hope on the road” — a blinkered view in 2017, after the passage of Arizona SB 1070, which required law enforcement to request the immigration papers of anyone suspected of being in the country illegally (portions of the bill have since been overturned). Not to mention that in the light of the death of Philando Castile, among others, and the beating of Sureshbhai Patel, the open road seems romantic only to some. Only toward the end of the book does Bruder reckon, and then perfunctorily, with the fact that the workamper phenomenon she describes is limited almost exclusively to white people. (“Perhaps the problem was racism?”) It’s all over in a page and a half. It’s a shoulder shrug.
And while there are more than a few references to the Okies, there is no acknowledgment of the more than three million migrant workers in this country, who perhaps pick the same fruit and work the same backbreaking jobs as Bruder’s white would-be retirees.
These omissions don’t doom the book; but they do mark it. You ache for the Gulf War veteran who tells Bruder, “I survived the Army. I can survive Amazon.” But you also ache for the ones without even this option, who don’t even merit a mention.
Follow Parul Sehgal on Twitter: @parul_sehgal
Nomadland
Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century
By Jessica Bruder
273 pages. Norton. $26.95.
Review: 'Nomadland,' by Jessica Bruder
NONFICTION: Journalist looks at the growing number of "houseless" folks forced to move between seasonal jobs.
By Kim Ode Star Tribune SEPTEMBER 22, 2017 — 9:40AM
Compact travel trailer glowing with warm light through windows in a forest RV park in the Pacific Northwest of the USA.
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Compact travel trailer glowing with warm light through windows in a forest RV park in the Pacific Northwest of the USA.
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If you’re in a city but you live in a van, or a trailer, or a tent, you are considered homeless.
But if you’re in the desert or the forest, you’re camping.
Rationalizations such as these are what make “Nomadland” such a compelling look at a weirdly camouflaged swath of society that’s more entwined around us than we realize.
Author Jessica Bruder, a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, immersed herself among those who move between seasonal jobs at a time when they’d imagined contemplating retirement, but life went haywire.
Change often began with a job layoff. Then they downsized, still fell behind and finally realized that their earlier lives cannot be reclaimed. Losers? Sure, some have made bad decisions. But most simply have lost, for reasons over which they had no control.
So they’ve become nomads, finding temporary work during the sugar beet harvest in North Dakota, or in Amazon fulfillment centers, or as campground hosts. Bruder is struck by their resiliency and humor. They reject the term “homeless,” instead calling themselves “houseless,” owning “wheel estate.” Far from loners, they have created community. Some call it their “vanily.”
“Nomadland” by Jessica Bruder
“Nomadland” by Jessica Bruder
And it’s growing.
Much of the book is shaped around Linda May, a 65-year-old grandmother who lives in a small trailer she tows with a totaled-and-salvaged Jeep Grand Cherokee. We meet her on the way to a summer’s stint as a campground host, where she’ll pick up trash, clean toilets three times a day, greet campers and hopefully not have to police them too much. As a returning host, she’ll earn $9.35 an hour and get a free campsite.
May is a hoot, spirited and game, even as she dreads the physical toll that she knows her next gig at an Amazon warehouse will exact. “Beneath the fatigue, however, was a slow-dawning sense of pride,” Bruder wrote. “She felt self-sufficient and free.”
These nomads are not necessarily to be pitied. They are inventive and savvy, frugal and generous. When they gather at a campground for bring-your-own-topping baked potato night, they are, as one put it, “hiding in plain sight.”
Bruder is gentle with them, not judging nor theorizing too much about consequences to follow.
Still, upon returning home to Brooklyn after a summer on the road, she’s taken aback by the camper vans and travel trailers on the streets. She’d never paid them much mind, but now recognizes the signs of human habitation.
“What further contortions — or even mutations — of the social order will appear in years to come?” she asks. “How many people will get crushed by the system? How many will find a way to escape it?”
This is important, eye-opening journalism, presented for us to contemplate: What if?
Kim Ode is a features writer at the Star Tribune.
Nomadland
By: Jessica Bruder.
Publisher: W.W. Norton, 273 pages, $26.95.