America is a grotesquely polarized society & becoming more so all the time. In this razor-sharp funny & terrifying collection of pieces Barbara Ehrenreich shows how the widening gap between rich & poor over the past eight years has left the country increasingly divided between the gated communities on the one hand & the trailer parks & tenements on the other. She describes a country where the super-rich travel by private jet while low-paid workers make multiple bus trips to get to their jobs; where a wealthy minority obsessively consumes cosmetic surgery while the poor often go without basic health care for their children; where members of the moneyed elite can buy congressmen while a troubling proportion of the working class can barely buy lunch. Ehrenreich writes corruscatingly about the pay of CEOs the treatment of illegal immigrants the way Wal-Mart spies on & interrogates its employees & the fact that its easier to get health insurance in America for a pet than for a child. Going to Extremes" brilliantly anatomises a nation approaching its 2008 election scarred by deepening equality & corroded by distrust."