The Snarling Citizen is a hard-hitting collection of essays from one of America's most perceptive commentators. Barbara Ehrenreich is saddened by rising illiteracy, the nation's seeming addiction to violence and horror, the triumph of trash on television, the continuation of foreign policy based on the U.S. as a warrior culture, and the widespread phenomenon of compassion fatigue. Ehrenreich lashes out at the passivity of individuals who depend on the outside world for spirit and substance. She notes: "It comes to me, in a surge of revolutionary insight, that our lives — meaning whatever it is that continues to happen when the TV is off and even when the power has failed — are richer and vastly more curious than anything we will find in the flickering realm of image and spectacle."