Squeezed by Alissa Quart

Squeezed by Alissa Quart

One of TIME's Best New Books to Read This Summer

"Brilliant--a keen, elegantly written, and scorching account of the American family today. Through vivid stories, sharp analysis and wit, Quart anatomizes the middle class's fall while also offering solutions and hope." 

   -- Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed

Families today are squeezed on every side--from high childcare costs and harsh employment policies to workplaces without paid family leave or even dependable and regular working hours. Many realize that attaining the standard of living their parents managed has become impossible.

Alissa Quart, executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, examines the lives of many middle-class Americans who can now barely afford to raise children. Through gripping firsthand storytelling, Quart shows how our country has failed its families. Her subjects--from professors to lawyers to caregivers to nurses--have been wrung out by a system that doesn't support them, and enriches only a tiny elite.

Interlacing her own experience with close-up reporting on families that are just getting by, Quart reveals parenthood itself to be financially overwhelming, except for the wealthiest. She offers real solutions to these problems, including outlining necessary policy shifts, as well as detailing the DIY tactics some families are already putting into motion, and argues for the cultural reevaluation of parenthood and caregiving.

Written in the spirit of Barbara Ehrenreich and Jennifer Senior, Squeezed is an eye-opening page-turner. Powerfully argued, deeply reported, and ultimately hopeful, it casts a bright, clarifying light on families struggling to thrive in an economy that holds too few options. It will make readers think differently about their lives and those of their neighbors.

Quart, Alissa: - Alissa Quart's poetry has appeared in the London Review of Books, The Awl, Fence, Open City, Feminist Studies, and many other publications, as well as in her poetry chapbook Solarized. She is the author of three non- fiction books: Branded (Basic Books, 2003), Hothouse Kids (Penguin Press, 2006), and Republic of Outsiders: The Power of Amateurs, Dreamers and Rebels (The New Press, 2013). Her nonfiction titles have been translated into 14 languages. She has written features for The New York Times Magazine, Elle, The Atlantic, The Nation, and many other magazines and has contributed frequent reported opinion pieces to The New York Times and elsewhere. With Barbara Ehrenreich, she is editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a non-profit that supports journalism about inequality. She wrote and produced the Emmy-nominated multimedia project The Last Clinic for The Atavist. She has taught at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism among other universities and was a 2010 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780062412263
ISBN 10	0062412264
Title	Squeezed
Author	Alissa Quart
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	HarperCollins Publishers Inc
Year published	2019-05-07
Number of pages	336
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.