Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty level wages. Distinguished journalist Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them, in order to find out how anyone survives on six to seven dollars an hour. Ehrenreich left home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find and accepted whatever job she was offered, from cleaning to care work, waitressing to folding clothes at Walmart. So began a gruelling, hair-raising and darkly funny odyssey through the underside of working America. In this brilliant, gripping and extraordinarily timely book, Barbara Ehrenreich expertly peels away the layers of self-denial, self-interest and self-protection that insulate the rich from the poor, the served from the servers, the housed from the homeless. This is a book about collective blindness that will change the way you see (Naomi Klein, author of No Logo)