Nomadland ★★★★★

Nomadland (Click Here To Buy)

★★★★★

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder is a non-fiction book about older people in America forced out their homes and living in vehicles, traveling all over the country to find work.

I read this as an audiobook checked out from the library.

This is a truly incredible piece of journalism. Bruder spent years traveling and working with people who were living out of their vans. She mainly followed a woman named Linda May who travels around in her jeep and sleeps in a trailer she pulls behind and calls the "Squeeze Inn." People in these situations, who prefer to be called "houseless," collect the pocket change that is social security and then have to find seasonal jobs all around the country ranging from working in an Amazon warehouse (which have just terrible conditions, they need to #unionize) to working as campground hosts to harvesting beets or other foods. Bruder does a great job of not only making these people human but also explaining from a national perspective how we got to this point.

As you may or may not know, there is a fictionalized movie based on this book that is nominated for a number of Oscars this year including best picture, best director, and best actress. Chloé Zhao, director and editor, wrote the screenplay for the film with Bruder as a consulting producer. Frances McDormand, the lead, is also a producer. Zhao uses real people that Bruder talks about in the book as lightly fictionalized versions of themselves. The end result is stunning. I predict this will win a number of Oscars.

If you liked Nomadland, I also recommend Evicted by Matthew Desmond, Travels with Charlie by John Steinbeck, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, and Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon.

Happy reading and happy Oscar week,

Ms.Bjork