Executive director at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and an Emmy Award-winning journalist whose books include the recent Squeezed, Quart argues that the U.S. laser-sharp fixation on relentlessly, self-reliantly going it alone damages both individuals and society. It hampers initiatives aimed at alleviating hardship and inequality and shifts responsibility to those with the least wherewithal to change their circumstances. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

Informed by the COVID-19 pandemic's magnification of our national inequalities, Quart picks at the threads of the American dream to reveal a richer tapestry, where interdependence and cooperation support the entire community. The idea of being able to "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is patently absurd, opines Quart, in a nation where 60 percent of wealth is inherited, tracing this myth from Emerson and Horatio Alger to the cover of Forbes trumpeting Kylie Jenner's status as a "self-made" billionaire. Quart probes invisible privilege and the effects of programs like the Homestead Act, which provided white Americans with generational wealth while others must now rely on a "dystopian social safety net" filled with entrenched bureaucracies that make getting aid difficult, humiliating, and/or impossible. She then contributes ideas from already existing volunteer, mutual-aid, and participatory-budgeting organizations that combat these racial, social, and economic inequalities to create a more just world. Bootstrapped asks readers to begin by simply questioning the dominant narrative of the go-it-alone American success story. Recommended for fans of Matthew Desmond's Evicted (2016), Linda Tirado's Hand to Mouth (2014), and Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided (2009).

Journalist and poet Quart (Squeezed) delivers an impassioned and historically grounded argument for more economic and social interdependence in American society. Contending that "pulling oneself up by the bootstraps" has become a near-impossible moral aspiration for many Americans, Quart reveals the unexamined advantages and government assistance behind the self-made myths of public figures including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horatio Alger, Ayn Rand, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk. Rather than upholding an unreachable ideal of independence and self-reliance that shames people for not achieving success, Quart argues that Americans should become comfortable acknowledging a more realistic state of interdependence, where lives are shaped by the help of parents, teachers, caretakers, and access to opportunity. She buttresses her claims with details about "the rise of small-scale democratic workplaces and novel forms of citizen altruism and activism" during the Covid-19 pandemic and vivid profiles of multiracial city co-ops, grassroots coalitions of activists and medical students performing ad-hoc community services, and a therapist whose work is "informed by social class awareness." Quart's vision of an America where no one needs to put on "codified theatrical performances via social media" to get the help they need is a breath of fresh air. This eloquent and incisive call to action inspires. (Mar.)

A contrarian rebuttal of the notion that wealthy Americans deserve everything they have and that the "poor are responsible for their own poverty." Building on her previous book, Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America, journalist Quart, head of a nonprofit called the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, dissects the notion of bootstrapping, "a shorthand term I am using to describe…every-man-for-themselves individualism." As the author amply demonstrates, that doctrine of individualism has been a long-standing, deeply ingrained trope in American life. To demonstrate that fact, Quart examines aspirational literary works by writers such as Horatio Alger and Laura Ingalls Wilder, the latter of whom, writes Quart, painted a portrait in her Little House series of rugged self-reliance even as her father "was not such a great farmer and thus leaned on his neighbors for help far more than Wilder tended to admit in her books." Emerson and even Thoreau are called on the carpet and found wanting, too, before Quart moves on to modern rallying cries such as the mindfulness movement, carefully instilled in corporate culture not to produce generations of Buddhist saints but instead to urge people to become more productive. Within this system, far too many people rely on a "dystopian social safety net" in order to make it from paycheck to paycheck or even to stay alive, whether visiting warming stations to keep from freezing to death in winter or free dental clinics to offset the fact that "fewer than half of American dentists accept Medicaid." Against these harsh realities, which she reports on cogently and without rancor, Quart proposes a more meaningful safety net of cooperative work and mutual aid, whereby workers pool their capabilities and time to produce needed and sustainable things while being their own bosses--a situation that, she notes, reflects dependence, independence, and interdependence all at once. A provocative, important repudiation of gig-economy capitalism that proposes utopian rather than dystopian solutions. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.