Her “devastating, revelatory book” ( The Washington Post) foreshadows the precarious future that may await more of us, while still managing to celebrate the quintessentially American resilience and creativity of her subjects.
She came away determined to shine a light on the urgency of providing affordable housing, raising the minimum wage, preserving Social Security, and decriminalizing homelessness. In a feat of immersive journalism, Bruder drove from coast to coast and from Mexico to Canada―a total of 15,000 miles―and spent months living in a secondhand camper van nicknamed Halen to understand her subjects’ lives and experiences on a more personal level. When Social Security comes up short and their mortgages sink underwater, these overlooked casualties of the Great Recession take to the road in old RVs, trailers, and camper vans, forming a migrant community of self-identified “workampers.” Nomadland follows Bruder’s unforgettable subjects as they clean campground toilets, scan products in warehouses, and harvest beets in a scramble to survive, often long past the age at which they expected to retire. Employers from big-box retailers to commercial farmers have found a new source of cheap labor: transient older Americans. Marked by a deep-seated empathy and clear-headed eye for detail, her “stunning and beautifully written” (Arlie Hochschild, The New York Times Book Review) stories haunt us long after we’ve finished reading.īruder’s Nomadland-the basis of the Oscar-winning film of the same name -documents the lives of itinerant Americans who travel from job to job out of economic necessity. Hailed by The New Yorker as “an acute and compassionate observer,” Nomadland author Jessica Bruder reports on social injustice, subcultures, and the dark underbelly of American capitalism.
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