Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I admit, I was lured by the marketing ploys used on the cover of the book (who can resist "riveting grit"?). By the end of the book (well, before, really) I was ready to throw it across the room. Ehrenreich's experiment turned out to be merely a pretext for promoting her ready-made, pampered-liberal-white-woman's views. Instead of being transformed by her experiences, she seems to have come away even more entrenched in her already-held opinions and two-dimensional views of working-class women. Her "instant proletarian" identity, and the way she suddenly began spouting the corresponding rhetoric, was disingenuous, if not laughable. She knew that she was not one of "them," nor even that she would end up being a friend to one of "them." She seemed to care so very deeply about these women collectively, while remaining at an arm's-length on the personal level, never truly getting involved. Then, her conclusions at the end seemed sophomoric, based largely on subjective notions of psychology and sociology. I was glad she pointed out that some of the "Merry Maids," when interviewed about how they felt about the people whose houses they cleaned, never felt the kind of resentment, malice, or self-righteousness that Ehrenreich evinced while cloaked in her over-sympathetic, contrived persona. Disappointingly, whenever Ehrenreich encountered views and attitudes among these women that challenged her preconceptions, instead of taking them to heart, she just seemed to write them off as curiosities and anomalies. The nerve this book touched for me was one of embarrassment, since I consider myself a liberal of similar educational and economic background to Ehrenriech, but apparently not nearly as sheltered from (or surprised by) the working class world as she seems to be (doesn't she even have any family members in dire straits?). That there are so many elite, insulated people "enlightened" by this book, enough to make it a bestseller, worries me. I'm considering whether this book hasn't pushed me a few notches to the right. I concluded that a more interesting experiment would be to have a poor woman write a book about taking the place of a Barbara Ehrenreich for a year, with all the P.C. trappings of the upper-middle-class educated elite, and see what conclusions she reaches.