General Books - Page 3

Bridges Out of Poverty

Philip DeVol; Terie Dreussi Smith Ruby K. Payne

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Bridges Out of Poverty is a unique and powerful tool designed specifically for social, health, and legal services professionals. Based in part on Dr. Ruby K. Payne's myth shattering A Framework for Understanding Poverty, Bridges reaches out to the millions of service providers and businesses whose daily work connects them with the lives of people in poverty. In a highly readable format you'll find case studies, detailed analysis, helpful charts and exercises, and specific solutions you and your organization can implement right now to: Redesign programs to better serve people you work with; Build skill sets for management to help guide employees; Upgrade training for front-line staff like receptionists, case workers, and managers; Improve treatment outcomes in health care and behavioral health care; Increase the liklihood of moving from welfare to work. If your business, agency, or organization works with people from poverty, only a deeper understanding of their challenges-and strengths-will help you partner with them to create opportunities for success.

Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich

Kevin Phillips

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Total reviews: 135 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

For more than thirty years, Kevin Phillips' insight into American politics and economics has helped to make history as well as record it. His bestselling books, including The Emerging Republican Majority (1969) and The Politics of Rich and Poor (1990), have influenced presidential campaigns and changed the way America sees itself. Widely acknowledging Phillips as one of the nation's most perceptive thinkers, reviewers have called him a latter-day Nostradamus and our "modern Thomas Paine." Now, in the first major book of its kind since the 1930s, he turns his attention to the United States' history of great wealth and power, a sweeping cavalcade from the American Revolution to what he calls "the Second Gilded Age" at the turn of the twenty-first century.

The Second Gilded Age has been staggering enough in its concentration of wealth to dwarf the original Gilded Age a hundred years earlier. However, the tech crash and then the horrible events of September 11, 2001, pointed out that great riches are as vulnerable as they have ever been. In Wealth and Democracy, Kevin Phillips charts the ongoing American saga of great wealth–how it has been accumulated, its shifting sources, and its ups and downs over more than two centuries. He explores how the rich and politically powerful have frequently worked together to create or perpetuate privilege, often at the expense of the national interest and usually at the expense of the middle and lower classes.

With intriguing chapters on history and bold analysis of present-day America, Phillips illuminates the dangerous politics that go with excessive concentration of wealth. Profiling wealthy Americans–from Astor to Carnegie and Rockefeller to contemporary wealth holders–Phillips provides fascinating details about the peculiarly American ways of becoming and staying a multimillionaire. He exposes the subtle corruption spawned by a money culture and financial power, evident in economic philosophy, tax favoritism, and selective bailouts in the name of free enterprise, economic stimulus, and national security.

Finally, Wealth and Democracy turns to the history of Britain and other leading world economic powers to examine the symptoms that signaled their declines–speculative finance, mounting international debt, record wealth, income polarization, and disgruntled politics–signs that we recognize in America at the start of the twenty-first century. In a time of national crisis, Phillips worries that the growing parallels suggest the tide may already be turning for us all.

The Working Poor: Invisible in America

David K. Shipler

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 75 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

“Nobody who works hard should be poor in America,” writes Pulitzer Prize winner David Shipler. Clear-headed, rigorous, and compassionate, he journeys deeply into the lives of individual store clerks and factory workers, farm laborers and sweat-shop seamstresses, illegal immigrants in menial jobs and Americans saddled with immense student loans and paltry wages. They are known as the working poor.

They perform labor essential to America’s comfort. They are white and black, Latino and Asian--men and women in small towns and city slums trapped near the poverty line, where the margins are so tight that even minor setbacks can cause devastating chain reactions. Shipler shows how liberals and conservatives are both partly right–that practically every life story contains failure by both the society and the individual. Braced by hard fact and personal testimony, he unravels the forces that confine people in the quagmire of low wages. And unlike most works on poverty, this book also offers compelling portraits of employers struggling against razor-thin profits and competition from abroad. With pointed recommendations for change that challenge Republicans and Democrats alike, The Working Poor stands to make a difference.

Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor

Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Listen to a short interview with Sudhir Venkatesh
Host: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane

In this revelatory book, Sudhir Venkatesh takes us into Maquis Park, a poor black neighborhood on Chicago's Southside, to explore the desperate, dangerous, and remarkable ways in which a community survives. We find there an entire world of unregulated, unreported, and untaxed work, a system of living off the books that is daily life in the ghetto. From women who clean houses and prepare lunches for the local hospital to small-scale entrepreneurs like the mechanic who works in an alley; from the preacher who provides mediation services to the salon owner who rents her store out for gambling parties; and from street vendors hawking socks and incense to the drug dealing and extortion of the local gang, we come to see how these activities form the backbone of the ghetto economy.

What emerges are the innumerable ways that these men and women, immersed in their shadowy economic pursuits, are connected to and reliant upon one another. The underground economy, as Venkatesh's subtle storytelling reveals, functions as an intricate web, and in the strength of its strands lie the fates of many Maquis Park residents. The result is a dramatic narrative of individuals at work, and a rich portrait of a community. But while excavating the efforts of men and women to generate a basic livelihood for themselves and their families, Off the Books offers a devastating critique of the entrenched poverty that we so often ignore in America, and reveals how the underground economy is an inevitable response to the ghetto's appalling isolation from the rest of the country.

(20060904)

The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City

Jennifer Toth

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 114 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

stays with you 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I just came across this title in my Amazon recommendations. I read it about 15 years ago and I STILL think about it and recommend it. Absolutely fascinating. I would love to see a follow up to this story.

The Mole People - Great Book! 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

The Mole People was recommended to me while visiting NYC. I really enjoyed it and thought it was very well written. It is pretty amazing to learn what really is below the subways of New York. On my next visit I definitely will look more carefully when taking the subways to see if I can see any of these tunnels and passageways. I would recommend this book for anyone who loves NYC or enjoys reading about how some people really do exist underground.

"Mole People don't exist beneath the surface of NYC, but people do." 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Written back in 1993, 'The Mole People' might be a little dated, but I'm certain that the underground communities still not only exist but flourish beneath NYC and other cities. Jennifer Toth has written of the colorful background of the "under-city" and the colorful people who live there. Her study is literally peppered with stories straight from the mouths of those who live below, telling in their own way of their fears, their lives, their creed, their reasons, and most of all their humanity.

The tunnels are everywhere: Port Authority Station, Grand Central Station, Penn Station, Amtrak tunnels along the Hudson River in upper Manhattan, Amtrak tunnel under Hell's Kitchen along the West Side, under City Hall, below the theater district on Broadway, Lafayette Street Station, the Bowery tunnels, the Lexington Line, and more. Toth went into all of them, studying the societies as far down as seven levels underground.

She found loners, families, communities (like Bernard Issac's under Riverside Park), some complete with appointed "mayors". There's the "Condos", a natural underground cavern where two hundred people live. There's an old waiting room, complete with crystal chandelier and grand piano. A ninety-two foot merchant sailing ship was found under Front Street, as part of the landfill. Toth uncovers many mysteries in the deep.

Ranging from holes littered with needles and feces to vast chambers with stolen electricity, wallpaper, carpet, TV's and VCR's, kitchen utensils and food supplies, the "mole people" are a diverse people. Many suffer from mental illness and drug abuse, others range from illegal aliens to those who have Master's Degrees from "upstairs". All seem dispossessed in one way or another, whatever the reason for their decent into the tunnels.

Toth talks about the organizations to assist the tunnel people, like ADAPT and HELP, while Bernard talks about the same organizations as having their own, separate, job-saving, money-making agendas that go against what the tunnel people want or need.

The book contains black-and-white photos (though not enough), footnotes, bibliography, and an index. While Toth's study is well done and documented, I liked the fact that she let the people speak for themselves, dedicating a great portion of the book to their own words. This study is interesting, especially if you are fascinated by subcultures or just like "underground stories". I liked the book and recommend it. Enjoy!

Editorial Review:

This book is about the thousands of people who live in the subway, railroad, and sewage tunnels of New York City.

American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare

Jason Deparle

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Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Bill Clinton vowed to "end welfare as we know it" in his first run for president in 1992. Four years later, Congress translated a catchy slogan into a law that sent nine million women and children streaming from the rolls. Did it work? In his definitive book on this unprecedented upheaval in social policy, New York Times reporter and two- time Pulitzer Prize finalist Jason DeParle follows three women in one extended family to a set of surprising answers.

Cutting between the corridors of Washington and the meanest streets of Milwaukee, DeParle tracks the story from the White House to the local crack house. After twelve years on welfare, Angie, a truculent mother of three, finds a job and a 401(k)— and a boyfriend who tries to shoot her. Her cousin Jewell, glamorous even in sweatpants, adores the children she struggles to support. Opal combines an antic wit with an appetite for cocaine while the welfare agency that is supposed to help her squanders its millions. Drawing on more than a decade of reporting, DeParle traces their story back six generations to a common ancestor—a Mississippi slave—and adds politicians, case workers, reformers, and rogues to an epic exploration of America’s struggle with poverty and dependency.

Probing the law’s unlikely successes—and haunting failures—American Dream provides a startling expose´ in this election year.

Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass

Theodore Dalrymple

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 75 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Completely lacking in empathy 1 out of 5 stars.
2 of 8 people found this review helpful.

The author is just dripping in self-righteousness. He places 100% of the blame for bad situations on the decisions the poor have made. He shows no grace or empathy. His observations aren't necessarily wrong- but he extends his assumptions to everyone in the same situation.

This is how he explains that abused women choose to be abused:
"At first, of course, my female patients deny that the violence of their men was foreseeable. But when I ask them whether they think I would have recognized it in advance, the great majority- nine out of ten- reply, yes, of course. And when asked how they think I would have done so, they enumerate precisely the factors that would have led me to that conclusion. So their blindess is willful." P40

These sorts of explanations are given for all different types of ailments of the impoverished.

Well Written and Interesting 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Life at the Bottom reminds me, in many ways, of Down and Out in Paris and London. It is an author looking at the lower classes from a fairly intimate and not academic view. Like Orwell's book there's not a ton of sociological jargon or academic noodling. That makes the book extremely readable but it also limits it to being a bit more anecdotal than far reaching.

Editorial Review:

A searing account of life in the underclass and why it persists as it does, written by a British psychiatrist.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

James Agee

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

I thought I hated it at points, but I've never been able to get it out of my head. 4 out of 5 stars.
12 of 13 people found this review helpful.

This book is an amazing work of art. At times it's baffling, and at times almost impertinent--like when the author decides to describe every object in an entire home, and yet in all these things and in all the conflicting emotions it evokes, it creates a mood and a feeling and a setting that will seep into your skin and fog your brain for months.
The writing is beautiful, the story it tells--of poor, sharecropping, depression-era families--is heartbreaking, and the experience of reading about it all is like a baptism by fire. This book just might re-wire your brain.
I think this is a much better read than Agee's "A Death in the Family," and that one won the Pulitzer Prize. Read this, for sure.
I read it on a bus trip across Guatemala, and the way Agee's descriptions of the old southern poverty fit the poor little towns full of Guatemalan coffee pickers was uncanny.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and let us start with James Agee.

UPDATE: It's years later, and this book has never stopped haunting me. I think of it almost daily. If I were to review it today, I would definitely give it Five Stars.

Editorial Review:

The clasic that became the prototype of the modern nonfiction novel. A watershed literary event at its first publication in 1941, LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN is an "unsparing record of the harsh existence of three Alabama families, and a poetic meditation on the terrible beauty of their lives," recognized by the New York Public Library as one of the most influential books of the century.

Class: A Guide Through the American Status System

Paul Fussell

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 124 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A dated, trite & slightly amusing outline of consumer spending habits by class, c.1983 2 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

The bulk of this book is dedicated to consumer spending habits and while much has changed over the last 25 years (original copyright of 1983), there is a considerable amount that has stayed the same. There are some nuggets, but they are few and far between.

It is a light and fluffy distraction easily dispensed with in an afternoon. Those with a serious sociological interest would be far more satisfied with the work of Mills.

Just be sure to get it from the library, your bookshelves would not be complimented by it's presence.

Editorial Review:

In Class Paul Fussell explodes the sacred American myth of social equality with eagle-eyed irreverence and iconoclastic wit. This bestselling, superbly researched, exquisitely observed guide to the signs, symbols, and customs of the American class system is always outrageously on the mark as Fussell shows us how our status is revealed by everything we do, say, and own. He describes the houses, objects, artifacts, speech, clothing styles, and intellectual proclivities of American classes from the top to the bottom and everybody -- you'll surely recognize yourself -- in between. Class is guaranteed to amuse and infuriate, whether your class is so high it's out of sight (literally) or you are, alas, a sinking victim of prole drift.

Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail (BK Currents (Hardcover))

Paul Polak

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Inspiring book, leaves a little to be desired though 4 out of 5 stars.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful.

An inspiring book that makes one think about the greater good that can come out of poverty eradication & how we can all be a part of it.

Criticism:

1. Author does not cover how he made the transition from being a psychiatrist to creating IDE. This makes it harder to understand how one can participate in this cause, even if one wanted to.

2. While the book is a great food for thought, it seems to be more focused on the destination rather than the journey. At times, it reads more like a journal which may be intentional, but this inconsistency gives the reader, a rather half baked impression.

3. Author's disagreement with major organizations such as the UN feel like a rant at times, as he only criticizes them without putting forth any concrete suggestions for bigger issues such as infrastructure (development of roads, bridges, dam development, power generation, healthcare & educational programs).

[...]

Editorial Review:

Based on his 25 years of experience, Polak explodes what he calls the "Three Great Poverty Eradication Myths": that we can donate people out of poverty, that national economic growth will end poverty, and that Big Business, operating as it does now, will end poverty. Polak shows that programs based on these ideas have utterly failed--in fact, in sub-Saharan Africa poverty rates have actually gone up.

These failed top-down efforts contrast sharply with the grassroots approach Polak and IDE have championed: helping the dollar-a-day poor earn more money through their own efforts. Amazingly enough, unexploited market opportunities do exist for the desperately poor. Polak describes how he and others have identified these opportunities and have developed innovative, low-cost tools that have helped in lifting 17 million people out of poverty.