Book Review of Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

Before making a great success in the restaurant and wholesale beverage businesses, Alice Foote MacDougall and her three children had been thrust into deep poverty by her husband's financial failure. Raised in wealth and high social standing, she had been forced to ask relatives for help and was humiliated by their presumptuous inquiries about her lifestyle and expenditures. In her autobiography, recalling the period of deep poverty that followed her affluent childhood and preceded her eventual business success, MacDougall relates, "Poverty is relative, and the lack of food and of the nec…