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.
Eduardo Hughes Galeano was a Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist considered, among other things, "a literary giant of the Latin American left" and "global soccer's pre-eminent man of letters".
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Chain is a 2004 docufiction film written and directed by Jem Cohen. It follows two young women from opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. One is a Japanese professional who has been sent by her corporation to inspect theme parks in the United States. The other is a runaway who is squatting near a mall and works a series of dead-end jobs. The women never meet or communicate with each other, but by the end of the film, their viewpoints have become similar as their lives are both impacted by the homogenization of retail culture and infrastructure.
Jon Wiener is an American historian and journalist based in Los Angeles, California. His most recent book is Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, a Los Angeles Times bestseller co-authored by Mike Davis. He waged a 25-year legal battle to win the release of the FBI's files on John Lennon. Wiener played a key role in efforts to expose the surveillance, as well as the behind-the-scenes battling between the government and the former Beatle, and is an expert on the FBI-versus-Lennon controversy. A professor emeritus of United States history at the University of California, Irvine and host of The Nation's weekly podcast, Start Making Sense, he is also a contributing editor to the progressive political weekly magazine The Nation. He also hosts a weekly radio program in Los Angeles.
Ben Ehrenreich is an American freelance journalist and novelist who lives in Los Angeles.
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The Barack Obama "Hope" poster is an image of US president Barack Obama designed by American artist Shepard Fairey. The image was widely described as iconic and came to represent Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. It is a stylized stencil portrait of Obama in solid red, beige and blue, with the word "progress", "hope", or "change" below.
Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas is a non-fiction account by author and journalist Matthew O'Brien, with photos by Danny Mollohan. It chronicles the author's time in subterranean Las Vegas. As he pursued a killer who hid in the tunnels, he discovered hundreds of people living underground and interviewed many of them for the book. It was released in June 2007 by Huntington Press.
Amanda Petrusich is an American music journalist. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of three books: Pink Moon (2007), It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music (2008), and Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records (2014).
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.
Eric Jonathan Sheptock is an American advocate for the homeless. Sheptock is currently homeless, and often referred to as a homeless, homeless advocate.
Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America is the debut book by author Linda Tirado. The book was released on 2 October 2014 and contains a foreword written by Barbara Ehrenreich.
John Ehrenreich is an American clinical psychologist and social critic, who has published books on health policy, humanitarian policy, US history and US social policy. He is known for his development of the idea of the "medical–industrial complex" and the concept of the "professional–managerial class".
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