General Books - Page 4

The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order

Michel Chossudovsky

Amazon Price: $24.45 List Price: $24.95 Usually ships in 7 to 11 days By: Global Research Amazon Marketplace: 6 new & used starting at $21.95

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Economics -> International
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Industries & Professions -> Banks & Banking
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Popular Economics -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this new and expanded edition of Chossudovsky's international best-seller, the author outlines the contours of a New World Order which feeds on human poverty and the destruction of the environment, generates social apartheid, encourages racism and ethnic strife and undermines the rights of women. The result as his detailed examples from all parts of the world show so convincingly, is a globalisation of poverty. This book is a skilful combination of lucid explanation and cogently argued critique of the fundamental directions in which our world is moving financially and economically.In this new enlarged edition - which includes ten new chapters and a new introduction - the author reviews the causes and consequences of famine in Sub-Saharan Africa, the dramatic meltdown of financial markets, the demise of State social programs and the devastation resulting from corporate downsizing and trade liberalisation. The book has been published in 11 languages. Over 100,000 copies sold world-wide.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: The American Classic, in Words and Photographs, of Three Tenant Families in the Deep South

James Agee, Walker Evans

Amazon Price: $12.24 List Price: $18.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Mariner Books Amazon Marketplace: 85 new & used starting at $0.97

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Arts & Photography -> Artists, A-Z -> ( D-F ) -> Evans, Walker
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 20th Century -> General
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> State & Local -> General

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

Editorial Review:

Just what kind of book is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men? It contains many things: poems; confessional reveries; disquisitions on the proper way to listen to Beethoven; snippets of dialogue, both real and imagined; a lengthy response to a survey from the Partisan Review; exhaustive catalogs of furniture, clothing, objects, and smells. And then there are Walker Evans's famously stark portraits of depression-era sharecroppers--photographs that both stand apart from and reinforce James Agee's words.

Assigned to do a story for Fortune magazine about sharecroppers in the Deep South, Agee and Evans spent four weeks living with a poor white tenant family, winning the Burroughs's trust and immersing themselves in a sharecropper's daily existence. Given a first draft of the resulting article, the editors at Fortune quite understandably threw up their hands--as did several other editors who subsequently worked with a later book-length manuscript. The writing was contrary. It refused to accommodate itself to the reader, and at times it positively bristled with hostility. (What other book could take Marx as the epigraph and then announce: "These words are quoted here to mislead those who will be misled by them"?) Response to the book was puzzled or unfriendly, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men sputtered out of print only a few short years after its publication. It took the 1960s, and a vogue for social justice, to bring Agee's masterwork the audience it deserved.

Yet the book is far more interesting--aesthetically and morally--than the sort of guilty-liberal tract for which it is often mistaken. On an existential level, Agee's text is a deeply felt examination of what it means to suffer, to struggle to live in spite of suffering. On a personal level, it is the painful, beautifully written portrait of one man's obsession. In its collaboration with Evans's photographs, the book is also a groundbreaking experiment in form. In the end, however, it is more than merely the sum of its parts. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is, quite simply, a book unlike any other, simmering with anger and beauty and mystery. --Mary Park

Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System

Raj Patel

List Price: $19.95 By: Melville House Amazon Marketplace: 5 new & used starting at $99.68

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Industries & Professions -> General
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Industries & Professions -> General AAS
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Current Events -> Poverty -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

“One of the most dazzling books I have read in a very long time. The product of a brilliant mind and a gift to a world hungering for justice.”—Naomi Klein, author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine

Half the world is malnourished, the other half obese—both symptoms of the corporate food monopoly. To show how a few powerful distributors control the health of the entire world, Raj Patel conducts a global investigation, traveling from the “green deserts” of Brazil and protester-packed streets of South Korea to bankrupt Ugandan coffee farms and barren fields of India. What he uncovers is shocking—the real reasons for famine in Asia and Africa, an epidemic of farmer suicides, and the false choices and conveniences in supermarkets. Yet he also finds hope—in international resistance movements working to create a more democratic, sustainable, and joyful food system.

From seed to store to plate, Stuffed and Starved explains the steps to regain control of the global food economy, stop the exploitation of farmers and consumers, and rebalance global sustenance.

RAJ PATEL, policy analyst for Food First, a leading food think tank, is a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for African Studies. He has written for the Los Angeles Times and the Guardian, and though he has worked for the World Bank, WTO, and the UN, he’s also been tear-gassed on four continents protesting them.

Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence

John Hockenberry

Amazon Price: $10.85 List Price: $15.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Hyperion Amazon Marketplace: 134 new & used starting at $0.01

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Professionals & Academics -> Journalists
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Specific Groups -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Specific Groups -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 35 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

What to do when you answer the door and the wolf is there. 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

I want to keep my review short because, if you have not read this book, reading my review will take up some of the time in which you could be reading the real book. When "Moving Violations" was first published, I heard a review of it on NPR. John Hockenberry is an NPR alum so I expected the book to be almost as good as the review led me to believe. I ordered it from Amazon and devoured it in almost no time. It was actually better than the radio review had led me to expect. A month later, I got a call from Seattle that delivered horrific news. My 21-year-old son had been in a contest with gravity and gravity had won. Although he had just had 18 hours of surgery, there was no way to know if he would ever walk again. Through the years since that time, I have read "Moving Violations" many times. It initially gave me entrance to a new world and was much more helpful to both my son and I than all the rehab publications combined. I knew, from the moment I answered that phone call that both my son and I had crossed into the Twilight Zone and nothing would ever be the same again. The Twilight Zone, however, had at least one map. My son's journey was, and continues to be, unique (as all such journeys are). I did feel, from the very beginning, that we had a preview of some of the directional signposts and even some of the scenic overlooks. I cannot help but think that our family has been living and learning about this new life in a richer way than would never have been possible if we had not read this book. As soon as my son came home from rehab it became clear that he had lost his will to live. I had a captive audience and started reading "M V" aloud. It is well written and mirrors many of the dilemmas in the life of a young male with spinal cord damage. I think it only took two days for my son to get interested enough that he started reading it himself. This book was truly one of the first things that helped him recover his will to live. Living with a catastrophic spinal cord injury is not even at the bottom of the list of interesting travel sites, and while I cannot believe that anyone would take that path voluntarily, "M V" is proof that, along with the horror, there can be adventure and possibilities in life; possibilities that could be so easily missed. So...READ IT! While spinal cord injury may never be a part of your personal life, sooner or later something awful could be. As the Eagles remind us, "The wolf is always at the door." In whatever guise the wolf presents itself, you will have learned something useful about what to do when or if the wolf appears.

Editorial Review:

A journalist for National Public Radio and ABC News recounts the challenges he has faced as a paraplegic at home and abroad, from the dangers of war-torn Iraq and Jerusalem to discrimination at home. Reprint.

When Work Disappears : The World of the New Urban Poor

William Julius Wilson

Amazon Price: $10.85 List Price: $15.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Vintage Amazon Marketplace: 108 new & used starting at $1.38

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Job Hunting & Careers -> General AAS
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> General AAS
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Current Events -> Poverty -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

You can "prove" anything if you ignore the facts 1 out of 5 stars.
12 of 26 people found this review helpful.

Living in Washington, DC and seeing the changes in demographics in the city and surrounding area made me pick up this book at a sidewalk sale for 50 cents to see what Wilson's take on the "new urban poor" and his research correlating them to the loss of work opportunities. Reading this book should be mandatory at an advanced statistics course of how to come to bad conclusions through the use of selective and wrong data.
DC has never had a big industrial base, but it had a very strong and influential black middle class early in the 20th century up until FDR's New Deal when the city was swamped with undereducated and socially dysfunctional immigrants from the southern states. It is the same time that DC became a "black majority" city. This is the same time frame that Wilson uses to "prove" that there was a direct correlation with the loss of factory jobs and the explosion of the urban poor. In order to come to this conclusion, Wilson uses a lot of statistics taken out of context, manipulated to support his conclusions, and then come up with a rehash of "new" policy initiatives which are essentially a regurgitation of LBJ's "war on poverty" programs, which were an expansion and rehash of FDR's "New Deal."
What Wilson ignores are demographic shifts and trends that are much more easily explained and much more solidly supported by Charles Murray, Marvin Olasky, and others who were much more thorough in examining the trends that Wilson writes about.
The Washington DC area today has more jobs than ever before, yet the illegitimacy rate for black children is 90%. In the 1920's and 30's, the illegitimacy rate for whites and blacks was the same, even during the height of segregation and discrimination. The city now has a population base 25% smaller than its peak in the 50's. Even though job opportunities were expanding for minorities in DC, the black middle class abandoned DC and moved into Prince Georges County to get away from crime and other deteriorating social norms, but none of this is to be found in Wilson's research. The same is true for other cities where a combination of "white flight" and "black flight" of the middle class made these downtowns more closely resemble cities in third world countries than the USA. Similar problems can be found in Paris and its suburbs, and many other cities around Europe where immigration and a lack of assimilation have created huge ghettos of the "Urban Poor." There is indeed a much greater correlation to be found in the expansion of the size of the urban poor with the expansion of government programs designed to eliminate poverty. None of these alternative, and much more persuasive, reasons for the plight of the urban poor are to be found in this book. It was people like Wilson who "proved" Galileo to be wrong when he said that the Earth revolved around the sun, and this book is about as convincing.
There are many good statistics and arguments in this book. The problem is that Wilson has excluded any alternative explanations of the reasons for the urban poor, which makes this a very dishonest book.

Editorial Review:

An unofficial adviser to President Bill Clinton, Wilson has become a celebrity of sorts. A former University of Chicago professor, Wilson--currently on staff at Harvard--has been profiled in The New Yorker and dubbed one of America's most influential people by Time magazine. A respected thinker on issues of race and poverty, the author of The Declining Significance of Race and The Truly Disadvantaged offers his take on welfare and inner-city joblessness in When Work Disappears. Racism, Wilson argues, plays increasingly less of a role in urban problems. More significant, he claims, are changes in the global economy and the disappearance of unskilled but decent-paying jobs near cities; according to Wilson, these factors have deprived the urban working class of steady jobs, destroyed inner-city businesses, and caused younger, upwardly mobile residents to flee for the suburbs.

Poor People

William T. Vollmann

Amazon Price: $12.38 List Price: $16.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Harper Perennial Amazon Marketplace: 66 new & used starting at $4.11

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Current Events -> Poverty -> General
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Current Events -> Poverty -> General AAS
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Sociology -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Asking the question he chooses to ask.... 2 out of 5 stars.
9 of 9 people found this review helpful.

Vollman begins his book by subverting what he calls the Marxist paradigm of speaking about the poor....assuming what they want or need. Vollman speaks instead directly to his subjects...asking them quasi-naive questions. I read this book a few months ago and what has remained with me is a sense of something not quite achieved. I think Vollman approaches his subjects with compassion, but the way that he writes about them, the questions he ask are tainted in a way he never quite acknowledges....

when you pay someone for an interview, someone who is significantly less powerful and important than yourself, then you are stuck with two problems.

The first is that they will likely tell you what you want to know, instinctively reconfirming whatever your own prejudices or ideologies are....

I'm not saying that Vollman should not have paid his subjects, but that he should expect that they shared details of interest to him, not necessarily to themselves. It is not as if they are writing their own narratives. In fact, although Vollman in the beginning talks about speaking directly to his subjects, a lot of the book focuses on his arguments with them on the page, if not in person, and explaining to the reader in his own words why they are poor. The story of the Chernobyl victim comes to mind. Most of Vollman's sentences are descriptive and do not have his subjects speaking in their own voices.

Two, the primary question he focuses on, "Why are you poor?" perhaps ends up an embarassing question to ask over and over to people who may feel ashamed of the need to answer that question. Why does Vollman assume that his subjects know the answer to that question, or if they do know, that they will be able to tell him? If a poor person came to him to ask the question "why are you rich?" how would he answer?

If Vollman explains why he is rich, I've forgotten it. Yet nature of the relationship between rich and poor is the deeper narrative Vollman seems to be grappling with. Are the rich rich because the poor are poor? Marx would say yes. Vollman doesn't ask the question.

Vollman writes beautiful sentences , and yet in the end he seems a little too remote, too isolated from his subjects' experience to connect or to understand poverty on the level he seems to reach for. Some critics have accused him of having a poverty fetish and I think this points to a weakness. Is he writing about people who are poor or "poor people"?

Editorial Review:

That was the simple yet groundbreaking question William T. Vollmann asked in cities and villages around the globe. The result of Vollmann's fearless inquiry is a view of poverty unlike any previously offered.

Poor People struggles to confront poverty in all its hopelessness and brutality, its pride and abject fear, its fierce misery and quiet resignation, allowing the poor to explain the causes and consequences of their impoverishment in their own cultural, social, and religious terms. With intense compassion and a scrupulously unpatronizing eye, Vollmann invites his readers to recognize in our fellow human beings their full dignity, fallibility, pride, and pain, and the power of their hard-fought resilience.

The Road to Wigan Pier

George Orwell

Amazon Price: $11.20 List Price: $14.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Harvest Books Amazon Marketplace: 105 new & used starting at $2.49

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> England -> General
Subjects -> History -> Europe -> England -> General AAS
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( O ) -> Orwell, George -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 32 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

We have nothing to lose but our aitches 5 out of 5 stars.
14 of 14 people found this review helpful.

Contrary to my expectations, this is Orwell's most personal book. He bares his soul to us. At least I think he seriously tries to be perfectly honest, if not complete.
After his success with Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell got commissioned by the influential Left Book Club (Victor Gollancz one of the editors)to write a book about unemployment in the industrial and empoverished northern part of England. This was the mid 30s, the recent depression had led to high unemployment and endless misery in England as elsewhere.
GO went there and dug in and lived with workers and in boarding houses and crawled through mines (though he was about twice as tall as a miner should be) and talked to people and read statistics and reports.
The outcome is an oddity. Part 1 is a solid piece of investigative reporting and journalistic sociology. Chapter 1 is along the lines of Down and Out, an account of life in a boarding house in the North. Start with chapter 2 if you are squeamish. The hygienic conditions are worse than anything in Down and Out.
The following chapters in part 1 give us decsriptions of the life of miners and work in the coal mines, of the miners' leisure time, health, work safety, accidents, the housing conditions in the fearful northern slums (worse than the slums in India and Burma, says GO, because of the cold dampness), of unemployment and malnutrition, of food and fuel, of the uglyness of industrial countries at the time. The strongest chapter in this part, in my opinion, is the one on unemployment and its psychology. This subject is timeless. Even if the slums have changed, the essential condition of unemployment is surely unchanged.
So far so good and in line with the job description.
But then the man went and added a second part which deals in first place with himself, an autobiography and history of the thought of GO. Having grown up as a son of shabby genteels, he was raised on contempt for the working class. Public school education enforced the attitude. After school and after WW1, GO took a job in the imperial police in Burma and there learned to hate the system. He quit after 5 years and went into a personal crisis, a kind of horror vacui and hatred against his self. He goes on search of redemption as told with some embellishment in Down and Out. He tries to anihilate his social persona, but learns it does not work that way. The North England job gives him a chance to reconsider his position. He philosophizes about socialism and the classes. Interesting to us (at least to me), but shocking to the Left Book Club.
They decide to publish it anyway, but Gollancz adds a foreword where he thinks he needs to warn his club members that here is somebody who does not walk the line of good doctrinarism. Very odd.
By the way, did you know that quite likely fish and chips and the football pools have averted revolution in England by providing 'panem and circenses'? Says Orwell, and I love him for that kind of insight.
(This concludes my Orwell cycle, unless I decide to re-visit Burma and Catalonia.)

Editorial Review:

Although George Orwell grew up in the relative comfort of the English middle class, his socialist convictions and general sense of fairness led him to hate his country's deeply ingrained class structure. That perspective permeates this book, but the most striking elements are the quotidian details of life that Orwell observes in his first-person account of the lives of coal miners and others in the poor north of England. Wigan Pier is almost too realistic at times, as Orwell brings his unparalleled powers of observation to portray the wretched conditions of the working class. That Orwell may have slanted his reporting to make things look worse than they were is a question that does not lessen the book's interest.

Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform

Sharon Hays

Amazon Price: $13.59 List Price: $19.99 Usually ships in 9 to 14 days By: Oxford University Press, USA Amazon Marketplace: 40 new & used starting at $8.50

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Gay & Lesbian -> General AAS
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Current Events -> Poverty -> Social Services & Welfare
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Current Events -> Poverty -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Hailed as a great success, welfare reform resulted in a dramatic decline in the welfare rolls--from 4.4 million families in 1996 to 2 million in 2003. But what does this "success" look like to the welfare mothers and welfare caseworkers who experienced it? In Flat Broke With Children, Sharon Hays tells us the story of welfare reform from inside the welfare office and inside the lives of welfare mothers, describing the challenges that welfare recipients face in managing their work, their families, and the rules and regulations of welfare reform.
Welfare reform, experienced on the ground, is not a rosy picture. The majority of adult welfare clients are mothers--over 90 percent--and the time limits imposed by welfare reform throw millions of these mostly unmarried, desperate women into the labor market, where they must accept low wages, the most menial work, the poorest hours, with no benefits, and little flexibility. Hays provides a vivid portrait of their lives--debunking many of the stereotypes we have of welfare recipients--but she also steps back to explore what welfare reform reveals about the meaning of work and family life in our society. In particular, she argues that an inherent contradiction lies at the heart of welfare policy, which emphasizes traditional family values even as its ethic of "personal responsibility" requires women to work and leave their children in childcare or at home alone all day long.
Hays devoted three years to visiting welfare clients and two welfare offices, one in a medium-sized town in the Southeast, another in a large, metropolitan area in the West. Drawing on this hands-on research, Flat Broke With Children is the first book to explore the impact of welfare reform on motherhood, marriage, and work in women's lives, and the first book to offer us a portrait of how welfare reform plays out in thousands of local welfare offices and in millions of homes across the nation.

Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood, Third Edition

Jay Macleod

Amazon Price: $34.45 List Price: $39.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Westview Press Amazon Marketplace: 45 new & used starting at $19.99

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Economics -> General AAS
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Current Events -> Poverty -> General
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Current Events -> Poverty -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

This classic text addresses one of the most important issues in modern social theory and policy: how social inequality is reproduced from one generation to the next. With the original 1987 publication of Ain’t No Makin’ It Jay MacLeod brought us to the Clarendon Heights housing project where we met the “Brothers” and the “Hallway Hangers.” Their story of poverty, race, and defeatism moved readers and challenged ethnic stereotypes. MacLeod’s return eight years later, and the resulting 1995 revision, revealed little improvement in the lives of these men as they struggled in the labor market and crime-ridden underground economy.

The third edition of this classic ethnography of social reproduction brings the story of inequality and social mobility into today’s dialogue. Now fully updated with thirteen new interviews from the original Hallway Hangers and Brothers, as well as new theoretical analysis and comparison to the original conclusions, Ain’t No Makin’ It remains an admired and invaluable text.

Contents

Part One: The Hallway Hangers and the Brothers as Teenagers
1. Social Immobility in the Land of Opportunity
2. Social Reproduction in Theoretical Perspective
3. Teenagers in Clarendon Heights: The Hallway Hangers and the Brothers
4. The Influence of the Family
5. The World of Work: Aspirations of the Hangers and Brothers
6. School: Preparing for the Competition
7. Leveled Aspirations: Social Reproduction Takes Its Toll
8. Reproduction Theory Reconsidered

Part Two: Eight Years Later: Low Income, Low Outcome
9. The Hallway Hangers: Dealing in Despair
10. The Brothers: Dreams Deferred
11. Conclusion: Outclassed and Outcast(e)

Part Three: Ain’t No Makin’ It?
12. The Hallway Hangers: Fighting for a Foothold at Forty
13. The Brothers: Barely Making It
14. Making Sense of the Stories, by Katherine McClelland and David Karen

Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America

Robert I. Friedman

List Price: $25.95 By: Little, Brown and Company Amazon Marketplace: 47 new & used starting at $3.54

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Military -> Intelligence & Espionage
Subjects -> History -> Russia
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Crime & Criminals -> Criminology

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 50 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Amid his efforts to expose the Russian mob, Robert I. Friedman learned from the FBI that "the most brilliant and savage Russian mob organization in the world" had put a $100,000 price on his head. Reading Red Mafiya, it's not hard to see why: this is a brave book about a troubling subject. Friedman, a freelance journalist, describes the research behind it: "I ventured into the Russians' gaudy strip clubs in Miami Beach; paid surprise visits to their well-kept suburban homes in Denver; interviewed hit men and godfathers in an array of federal lockups; and traveled halfway around the world trying to make sense of their tangled criminal webs, which have ensnared everyone from titans of finance and the heads of government to entire state security services." Their racket involves heroin smuggling, weapons trafficking, mass extortion, and casino operation, among other activities. "Blending financial sophistication with bone-crunching violence, the Russian mob has become the FBI's most formidable criminal adversary, creating an international criminal colossus that has surpassed the Colombian cartels, the Japanese Yakuzas, the Chinese triads, and the Italian Mafia in wealth and weaponry," writes Friedman. They've even penetrated professional hockey, as Friedman shows in an eye-opening chapter ("Federal authorities have come to fear that the NHL is now so compromised by Russian gangsters that the integrity of the game itself may be in jeopardy").

Red Mafiya benefits from a breezy narrative in detailing a master criminal operation whose influence on the United States is growing rapidly. Russian mobsters already have siphoned off millions of dollars in foreign aid meant to prop up their country's economy--and they may have a more direct impact on American national security concerns in the years ahead: "The Russian mob virtually controls their nuclear-tipped former superpower," writes Friedman. Now, there's a scary thought. Lifting the Iron Curtain seems to have been a mixed blessing: it let freedom in, and organized crime out. --John J. Miller