 | |
| Author | Adam Shepard |
|---|---|
Publication date | 2007 |
Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream is a book by Adam Shepard, a graduate of Merrimack College, about his attempt to live the American Dream. It was conceived as a refutation of the books Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich.
While Shepard states that his story is not politically motivated, he did intend it to be a rebuttal to Barbara Ehrenreich's books Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch on a socio-economic level. He writes, "Ehrenreich attempted to establish that working stiffs are doomed to live in the same disgraceful conditions forever ... my story is a search to evaluate if hard work and discipline provide any payoff whatsoever or if they are, as Ehrenreich suggests, futile pursuits." [1] In achievement of his goal, Shepard resolved not to use his college education, credit history, or any of his previous contacts to help himself. Additionally, he would not beg for money or use services that were not available to others.
Along the way, Shepard explores controversial premises, such as:
A February 11, 2008, article about the book in The Christian Science Monitor states, "During his first 70 days in Charleston, Shepard lived in a shelter and received food stamps. He also made new friends, finding work as a day laborer, which led to a steady job with a moving company. Ten months into the experiment, he decided to quit after learning of an illness in his family. But by then he had moved into an apartment, bought a pickup truck, and had saved around $5,300." [3]
In retrospect, he finds that bias is a real issue for job seekers. For example, in a February 16, 2008, interview from NPR, Shepard admits, "you know, I was sitting there, and I was not really happy that I had passed out 50 applications, and nobody was getting back to me, and he just went nuts, and he said listen, Adam, you are a homeless dude. Nobody looks at your application—you know because I had my homeless shelter as my address—nobody looks at that and says hey, yeah, I want to hire Adam Shepard, the homeless guy." [4]
The book created great interest with the author Adam Shepard appearing in the Today Show , CNN, Fox News, and NPR as well as The Dave Ramsey Show and ABC program 20/20 . His book was featured in many publications, notably The New York Times , New York Post , The Atlantic , The Christian Science Monitor amongst others. Scratch Beginnings was used in curriculums or suggested reading material in tens of American and international universities, colleges and schools and translated into other languages. [5]
The author Adam Shepard is a graduate of Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts, where he studied with a basketball scholarship. He graduated with a degree in Business Management and Spanish.
After the success of Scratch Beginnings published by HarperCollins, he authored another book with the publishing house, The Best Four Years – full title The Best Four Years: How to Survive and Thrive in College (and Life) – about the years one spends in college based on his own experiences on how to make the most of the college experience from orientation to graduation.
After working as a bartender in North Carolina, he collected enough money to engage on a one-year world tour in 2011–2012 that took him to seventeen countries on four continents. He recounted his experiences in a book titled One Year Lived. [6]
He also created a series of courses under the title Next Level Success. [7]
On April 10, 2017, he released American Dream: A Documentary that chronicles in film footage his experiences when he is taken to a random American city and given $25 to survive for a month.
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America is a book written by Barbara Ehrenreich. Written from her perspective as an undercover journalist, it sets out to investigate the impact of the 1996 welfare reform act on the working poor in the United States.
Barbara Ehrenreich was an American author and political activist. During the 1980s and early 1990s, she was a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America. She was a widely read and award-winning columnist and essayist and the author of 21 books. Ehrenreich was best known for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a memoir of her three-month experiment surviving on a series of minimum-wage jobs. She was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award and the Erasmus Prize.
Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life, published on September 8, 1998, is a bestselling work and motivational business fable by Spencer Johnson. The text describes the way one reacts to major change in one's work and life, and four typical reactions to those changes by two mice and two "Littlepeople," during their hunt for "cheese." A New York Times business bestseller upon release, Who Moved My Cheese? remained on the list for almost five years and spent over 200 weeks on Publishers Weekly's hardcover nonfiction list. As of 2018, it has sold almost 30 million copies worldwide in 37 languages and remains one of the best-selling business books. This book guides the reader to anticipate change, adapt to change quickly, enjoy change and be ready to change quickly, again and again.
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Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream is a 2005 book by Barbara Ehrenreich. The book follows Ehrenreich's examination of the world of insecure low-wage work that constituted Nickel and Dimed, published in 2001. In this case, she decided to pseudonymously penetrate the corporate world instead and then write about the way in which things operate in reality in a similar manner to her earlier book. She embarked upon a quest to try to get a job in public relations.
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