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This is a story about what we preserve in the face of incalculable loss, inspired by the real life histories of scientists, librarians, and archivists rescuing and defending knowledge during war, famine, and collapse. In this case, the collapse is a projected future where the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets collapse, flooding NYC almost completely. Although it is an extremely bleak future, it's not without hope or respite.

As an upstate New Yorker who has traveled through many of the places mentioned in the book, I found the author's imagining of how various communities along the Hudson and beyond would react to the shutdown of international commerce, advanced medicine, and so on to be scarily plausible. I learned a new word from this book, one that the author did not invent: "hypercane," a category of hurricane that has been proposed but not yet recorded, with sustained wind speeds of 500mph (800kph). Scientists theorize that this type of storm could occur when ocean water temperatures reach 50C (122F).

Preble Jefferson can see into the future, about 5 seconds. What happens when governments figure out what he can do? And what can such a person do against world superpowers? To illustrate his power, two of the few ways to defeat him are to get him in an elevator where the trip takes longer than 5 seconds, or to carpet bomb enough area that he can't escape and he can't see it coming until it's too late.

There's a few scenes of Preble Jefferson doing his thing. There's a middle section where Preble Jefferson and his friend & lawyer Fish, a paranoid anarchist, discuss ways to structure government power to protect against institutional despotism. That section is disconnected, slow, and ultimately not germane to the story. And a final section where Preble Jefferson becomes all right with being a monster in defense of his family and takes on everything and everybody.

There's a lot of game theory in the story that feels very amateur. Luckily Boldizar doesn't dwell long enough on any one instance where I wanted to stop and think about it.

You can see the way the DNA of this book shows up in other, later texts, particularly Matthew Desmond’s Evicted. Reading this in 2025 is interesting because so little has changed—except that things have perhaps gotten even more dire, with 25 additional years of increased costs and the minimum wage only having risen minimally since then. However, I just wasn’t particularly compelled by Ehrenreich’s time “slumming it” as a low-wage worker. I’ve been a low-wage worker, and in my opinion having an “outsider” tell this story and find ways to make it palatable and legible to the class of people who read the NYT makes it less incisive. The best parts of this book are the additional research and footnotes, and there’s not enough of that for me to recommend this book over something like Maid (which offers a better, more visceral personal narrative) or Evicted (which avoids the trap Ehrenreich fell into by building the book’s narrative off of interviews rather than centering Desmond’s experience, and offers more background research).

I don’t regret reading it and it wasn’t a bad book, but it does surprise me how often this still gets recommended even now when it really doesn’t feel like it has much to say.

Also, the random fatphobic diatribe at the end of the book was so fucking annoying lmfao. Absolutely took me out of the book and made me roll my eyes, especially since I’m 99% sure we already had research indicating that poverty and fatness are deeply correlated in the US when this was written. Ehrenreich really shows her whole ass by denigrating the (likely similarly poor and overworked!) “wide-body” Wal-Mart customers in comparison to herself and her thin coworkers who are apparently more worthy of empathy. I didn’t put the book down after reading this bit because honestly it’s kind of to be expected from a middle-class white woman writing in 1999/2000, and also because it’s from a section where she emphasizes that the work seems to be making her more cruel and less empathetic. But that bit honestly just feels like punching down and also a missed opportunity to bring in some interesting research about how pursuing health, including a socially acceptable thin body, is not available to the working poor, and how being fat opens one up to additional discrimination and further poverty.

Basically: there are better books on this topic out there, by people with more complex lived experience. This book might be enlightening if you have never worked for minimum wage or cleaned toilets for a living, but if you have—skip it, you know more based on your own experience than Ehrenreich could have possibly put into this book.