Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Our sharpest and most original social critic goes "undercover" as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of American prosperity.

Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job -- any job -- can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you int to live indoors.

Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. You will never see anything -- from a motel bathroom to a restaurant meal -- in quite the same way again.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Part 1 The Foundations of Special Relativity
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Schematic Account of the Michelson-Morley Experiment
• 3 Inertial frames in Special Relativity
• 4 Einstein's Two Axioms for Special Relativity
• 5 Coordinates. The Relativity of Time
• 6 Derivation of the Lorentz Transformation
• 7 Properties of the Lorentz Transformation
• Part 2 Relativistic Kinematics
• 8 Introduction
• 9 Length Contraction
• 10 The Length Contraction Paradox
• 11 Time Dilation
• 12 The Twin Paradox
• 13 Velocity Transformation
• 14 Transformation of Linear Acceleration
• Part 3 Relativistic Optics
• 15 Introduction
• 16 The Drag Effect
• 17 The Doppler Effect
• 18 Aberration and the Visual Appearance of Moving Objects
• Part 4 Spacetime
• 19 Introduction
• 20 Spacetime and Four-Tensors
• 21 The Minkowski Map of Spacetime
• 22 Rules for the Manipulation of Four-Tensors
• 23 Four-Velocity and Four-Acceleration
• 24 Wave Motion
• Part 5 Relativistic Particle Mechanics
• 25 Introduction
• 26 The Conservation of Four-Momentum
• 27 The Equivalence of Mass and Energy
• 28 Some Four-Momentum Identities
• 29 Relativistic Billiards
• 30 The Center of Momentum Frame
• 31 Threshhold Energies
• 32 De Broglie Waves
• 33 Photons
• 34 The Angular Momentum Four-Tensor
• 35 Three-Force and Four-Force
• 36 Relativistic Analytic Mechanics
• Part 6 Relativity and Electromagnetism
• 37 Introduction
• 38 The Formal Structure of Maxwell's Theory
• 39 Transformation of e and b. The dual field.
• 40 Potential and Field of an Arbitrarily Moving Charge
• 41 Field of a Uniformly Moving Charge
• 42 The Electromagnetic Energy Tensor
• 43 Electromagnetic Waves
• Part 7 Relativistic Mechanics of Continua
• 44 Introduction
• 45 Preliminaries. External and Internal Forces
• 46 The Augmented Momentum and Mass Densities
• 47 The Equations of Continuity and of Motion
• 48 The Mechanical Energy Tensor
• 49 Perfect Fluids and Incoherent Fluids
• 50 Integral Conservation Laws