THE SNARLING CITIZEN by Barbara Ehrenreich...

THE SNARLING CITIZEN by Barbara Ehrenreich (HarperPerennial: $12; 245 pp.). Ehrenreich, whose outspoken essays appear regularly in Time, comments, “Our contemporary zeitgeist is a low, snarly creature that oozes from the TV and settles lump-like in the middle of the den, where it pulses lethargically and makes an occasional lunge for the dog.” An unrepentant liberal, she offers stinging commentaries on the status of women, the media attention lavished on O.J. Simpson and Lorena Bobbitt and the efforts of the religious right to turn the deist Founding Fathers into Christian zealots in the name of “traditional values.”