Ehrenreich, Barbara. Bait and switch: the (futile) pursuit of the American dream. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005. ISBN 0-8050-7606-9.

Summary: Pretending to be an experienced free-lance public-relations consultant, a middle-aged journalist and author spends a year trying to find a corporate job in public relations that pays at least $50,000 a year and includes health insurance. Her resume, though fake, is excellent, and she has friends in positions of authority who are willing to back up her disinformation with strong recommendations.

She winds up sinking thousands of dollars into job-coaching scams, bizarre est-like motivational workshops, “networking” groups that turn out to be fronts for religious cults, fashion makeovers, and so on, learning that middle-class job-hunting is as dehumanizing and stressful an enterprise as the marginal blue-collar employments that she wrote about in Nickel and dimed.