Summary of Jessica Bruder's Nomadland

By IRB Media

Get the Summary of Jessica Bruder's Nomadland in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: From the beet fields of North Dakota to the wilderness campgrounds of California to an Amazon warehouse in Texas, people who once might have kicked back to enjoy their sunset years are hard at work. Underwater on mortgages or finding that Social Security comes up short, they're hitting the road in astonishing numbers, forming a new community of nomads: RV and van-dwelling migrant laborers, or "workampers".

Building on her groundbreaking Harper's cover story, "The End of Retirement", which brought attention to these formerly settled members of the middle class, Jessica Bruder follows one such RVer, Linda, between physically taxing seasonal jobs and reunions of her new van-dweller family, or "vanily". Bruder tells a compelling, eye-opening tale of both the economy's dark underbelly and the extraordinary resilience, creativity, and hope of these hardworking, quintessential Americans - many of them single women - who have traded rootedness for the dream of a better life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Jun 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781638155324

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

Book preview

Summary of Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland

Overview

We all know there are homeless people everywhere, living on the streets or in their vehicles. But did you know there are people who willingly choose to live on the road? They don’t call themselves homeless. They prefer houseless, because they have a home on wheels.

Nomadland (2018) is a non-fiction book that tells the story of Linda and several other people who live in their vans and travel all over North America, working small jobs to stay alive. Most of them are above retirement age, but they don’t have enough savings to settle down, so they decided to free themselves from the shackles and costs of housing. This phenomenon, spurred in the 1930s by the Great Depression, has seen a revival in the last decade following the Great Recession. Nomadland, now an Oscar winning film, reveals the hardships and the sheer resilience of this growing community of nomads.

Insights from Foreword

#1

Itinerants,