Barbara Ehrenreich’s 1st book of satirical commentary, The Worst type of Years of Our Lives, which was about the Reagan period, was received with bestselling acclaim. The main one issue was the name: couldn’t some prophetic fact-checker have seen that the worst many years of our lives-far worse-were still to arrive? Here these are, the 2000s, and in This Property Is Their Land, Ehrenreich subjects these to probably the most biting and incisive satire of her profession.

Taking the way of measuring what we are remaining with after the about This Land Is Their Get: Reviews from a Divided Nation cruelest decade in memory, Ehrenreich discovers lurid extremes all around. While members from the moneyed elite can buy congressmen, many in the working class can hardly buy lunch time. While a wealthy minority obsessively consumes plastic surgery, the poor frequently go without healthcare for their children. And while the corporate C-suites are now nests of criminality, the much less fortunate are given a diet plan of morality, relationship, and abstinence. Ehrenreich’s antidotes are as sardonic as they are spot-on: pet insurance for your kids; Salvation Army styles for those who can no longer afford Wal-Mart; and boundless rage against those people who have given us a nation scarred by deepening inequality, corroded by distrust, and shamed by its public cruelty.