I listened to the Audible version of this book. I sort of echo the sentiments of other Audio listeners here on Goodreads when I say that the narrator was pretty flat throughout the tape. I probably wouldn't recommend listening to this book.

Anyhow, I did find the information in this book fairly interesting and Bruder's work serves as a good companion for other "working-class America" books that have appeared on shelves in recent years. The difference, though, between Nomadland and books like Heartland, Hillbilly Elegy, and Maid is that the former is not a memoir but a piece of investigative journalism more in line with something like Dopesick.

Bruder's work examines the lives of American "Workampers"—predominately white, 60 year old+ itinerant workers who live in vehicles and RVs and travel across American in search of temporary work at Amazon warehouses, national parks, and agricultural processing. Through the lives of these workers, Bruder argues that "retirement" has become, for most Americans, an unattainable dream due to failing social security, economic recession, and rising cost of living in many regions of America. Upon closer examination, however, most of the individuals that Bruder interviewed seem to have in common events that caused acute economic distress and dislocation: expensive divorces, disability, hefty medical bills, job loss, etc. Typical is the experience of one worker that Bruder interviewed who, earlier in life, had well-paying jobs but lost almost all of his retirement and his home to an especially acrimonious divorce later in his life. He now roams American in an RV looking for temporary work and living on meager social security income. Bruder seems to bury the lede here, as I constantly found myself questioning how typical this experience is for America's retirees considering the majority of those interviewed here experienced some type of major life crisis that produced such a state of insolvency.

Bruder does make a good case for women being particularly vulnerable to "houselessness" in old age. This is partly due to the fact that women, on average, outlive men and thus need more retirement savings to live on through old age. At the same time, though, because women are generally paid less than men for similar work it means they will receive far less in their annual stipend from social security than their male counterparts. For example, one woman interviewed by the author received a meager $500ish dollars per month from social security—not even enough to pay rent on a small apartment.

As a side note, Bruder's chapters about life toiling in an Amazon warehouse are especially well-written and provocative. The image of a septuagenarian Amazon temporary employee working third-shift, earning 11ish/hour, and walking upwards of 15-18 miles per day on hard concrete to "pick" items for shipment is unsettling, at best. To make matters worse, lower levels of Amazon management within the warehouse facilities as pictured as petty tyrants who constantly seek ways to ratchet up the productivity levels of their elderly workers.

Overall, Bruder produces a unique story about a marginal and vulnerable group of American workers that, I imagine, is atypical of the experience of the majority of Americans yet offers valuable lessons about the need to strengthen the economic safety net for our nation's retiring generation of workers. This book is less a continuous narrative than it is a series of snapshots (some have said magazine articles, which I think is fair) about different aspects of the "Workamper" lifestyle. I think Bruder leaves the overall message muddled for the reader, primarily because she seems to at times promote this sort of lifestyle as an escape from the constraints of debt servitude and consumerism and, at other times, rail against corporate greed and worker exploitation.

3/5 Stars.