BPL Book Review: Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

Note: Nomadland, a movie released in 2020 and adapted from the 2017 book, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, won the 2021 Oscar for Best Picture and Best Actress (Frances McDormand) in the Academy Awards held on Sunday, April 25. BPL Archivist Department Head Jim Baggett wrote a review of the book. Check it out below.

By Jim Baggett, Central Library Archives Department 

In Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (now also a movie starring Frances McDormand, but the book is better), journalist/author Jessica Bruder follows a wandering tribe of Americans who no longer have a place in the traditional economy. 

After losing jobs and homes in the 2009 economic collapse, and finding the job market unwelcoming to middle aged people, they left their bills and underwater mortgages behind and took to the roads. Calling themselves “vandwellers,” they live in RVs, vans, converted delivery trucks, and cars (they are not homeless, they will say, just houseless). 

Like owners of ships at sea, vandwellers name their homes on wheels—Lil’ Homey, Manatee, Squeeze Inn, Van Go, Vantucket, Vanna White, and van Halen. Vandwellers migrate from one seasonal job to another, taking tickets and running rides at amusement parks, picking crops, managing and cleaning campgrounds, and over the Christmas holidays enduring grueling ten-hour shifts at Amazon “fulfillment centers,” where workers in the 60s and 70s sometimes walk 15 miles a day pulling orders.

These nomadic people form roving and often temporary communities where individuals drift in and out, separating but then meeting up again at job sites or campgrounds. They stay in touch via Facebook. 

While many vandwellers come to appreciate their stripped down lives and the freedom of the road, it is a precarious and often difficult life. There is much to adjust to, and much to learn. 

Bob Wells, a philosopher king of the vandwellers , wrote “For most people, their first night sleeping in a van is so far out of their comfort zone” that their ‘fear will magnify every sound … and when you wake up in the morning, you will be disoriented and wonder where you are.” 

Nomadland tells the stories of a world most of us did not know existed, but its existence tells much about economic inequality in America.