Barbara Ehrenreich is one of the best, decidedly liberal, journalists going today. However you felt about her support of big government solutions to problems of poverty, Nickel & Dimed was a captivating account of what it's like to live on minimum wage. Going undercover, Ehrenreich worked as a waitress, Wal-Mart employee, maid and more, in an effort to show the indignities of the underclass.

With her latest book This Land is Your Land: Reports From a Divided Nation, she seems to have gotten a bit lazy. First of all, it's not really an original book at all; much of the material is pulled from columns she's written for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, The Progressive and The Nation. You wouldn't know that unless you read the acknowledgments on page 237.

Onto the content itself: the book is a series of more than 60 "rants" on various political issues including health care, education, social issues, the war in Iraq and corporate greed. I find myself agreeing with her on most of these issues, and her snark is nice, but this is not the brilliant journalism that I've come to associate with her. These read like blog posts, and the research often appears to be shoddy: she criticizes Stan O'Neal for presiding over "$8.4 million" in mortgage-related losses. She was too kind: it was actually about 1,000 times that amount.

If you're a hardcore liberal and like to read Molly Ivins and watch Michael Moore, you'll like this. If you're looking for the trenchant social commentary of some of her earlier books, look elsewhere.