Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (Barnes & Noble Discover Award Winner)

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (Barnes & Noble Discover Award Winner)

by Jessica Bruder
Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (Barnes & Noble Discover Award Winner)

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (Barnes & Noble Discover Award Winner)

by Jessica Bruder

Hardcover

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Overview

Winner of the 2017 B&N Discover Great New Writers Award for Nonfiction

The end of retirement?

From the beet fields of North Dakota to the National Forest campgrounds of California to Amazon’s CamperForce program in Texas, employers have discovered a new, low-cost labor pool, made up largely of transient older Americans. Finding that social security comes up short, often underwater on mortgages, these invisible casualties of the Great Recession have taken to the road by the tens of thousands in late-model RVs, travel trailers, and vans, forming a growing community of nomads: migrant laborers who call themselves “workampers.”

On frequently traveled routes between seasonal jobs, Jessica Bruder meets people from all walks of life: a former professor, a McDonald’s vice president, a minister, a college administrator, and a motorcycle cop, among many others—including her irrepressible protagonist, a onetime cocktail waitress, Home Depot clerk, and general contractor named Linda May.

In a secondhand vehicle she christens “Van Halen,” Bruder hits the road to get to know her subjects more intimately. Accompanying Linda May and others from campground toilet cleaning to warehouse product scanning to desert reunions, then moving on to the dangerous work of beet harvesting, Bruder tells a compelling, eye-opening tale of the dark underbelly of the American economy—one that foreshadows the precarious future that may await many more of us. At the same time, she celebrates the exceptional resilience and creativity of these quintessential Americans who have given up ordinary rootedness to survive. Like Linda May, who dreams of finding land on which to build her own sustainable “Earthship” home, they have not given up hope.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781324001966
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date: 03/07/2018
Sales rank: 1,153,608
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

About The Author

Jessica Bruder is an award-winning journalist whose work focuses on subcultures and the dark corners of the economy.
She has written for Harper’s Magazine, the New York Times,
and the Washington Post. Bruder teaches at the Columbia
School of Journalism.

Table of Contents

Foreword xi

Part 1

1 The Squeeze Inn 3

2 The End 29

3 Surviving America 39

4 Escape Plan 69

Part 2

5 Amazon Town 95

6 The Gathering Place 115

7 The Rubber Tramp Rendezvous 135

8 Halen 163

9 Some Unbeetable Experiences 183

Part 3

10 The H Word 201

11 Homecoming 207

Coda: The Octopus in the Coconut 243

Acknowledgments 253

Notes 257

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