General Books - Page 5

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

Jay Macleod

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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

The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order

Michel Chossudovsky

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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.

Faith the Cow

Susan Bame Hoover

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

wonderful wonderful 4 out of 5 stars.
13 of 15 people found this review helpful.

my mom wrote this book. it's so funny. i love it ever so much because the artist, maggie sykora, did a fabulous watercolor job on this book. the pictures drip off the page into puddles of enlightened christian history into your lap. it's wonderful.

That, and learning about Heifer Project Int'l is great. It's such a wonderful organization and it's founding is pretty interesting. This is a pretty basic book (made for preschoolers and elementary kids, etc.) but it's really a good book. People are always telling my mom how much they love it, etc.. Kids are always enthralled with it for some reason and parents love that it's moralistic and historical and well written. I think you should pick it up. (however, i'm partial.)

All You Need is Faith 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

My two year old son adores this book and so do I. It is an excellent lesson in changing the world. The illustrations are wonderful, and the words are so hopeful. It is absolutely the kind of book I want to read to my children to counterbalance all the other messages they get each day telling them that they can't make a difference.

The Road to Wigan Pier

George Orwell

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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:

In the 1930s Orwell was sent by a socialist book club to investigate the appalling mass unemployment in the industrial north of England. He went beyond his assignment to investigate the employed as well-”to see the most typical section of the English working class.” Foreword by Victor Gollancz.

Poor People

William T. Vollmann

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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.

When Work Disappears : The World of the New Urban Poor

William Julius Wilson

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

Editorial Review:

Wilson, one of our foremost authorities on race and poverty, challenges decades of liberal and conservative pieties to look squarely at the devastating effects that joblessness has had on our urban ghettos. Marshaling a vast array of data and the personal stories of hundreds of men and women, Wilson persuasively argues that problems endemic to America's inner cities--from fatherless households to drugs and violent crime--stem directly from the disappearance of blue-collar jobs in the wake of a globalized economy. Wilson's achievement is to portray this crisis as one that affects all Americans, and to propose solutions whose benefits would be felt across our society. At a time when welfare is ending and our country's racial dialectic is more strained than ever, When Work Disappears is a sane, courageous, and desperately important work.

"Wilson is the keenest liberal analyst of the most perplexing of all American problems...[This book is] more ambitious and more accessible than anything he has done before."--The New Yorker

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

Sharon Hays

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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.

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

Raj Patel

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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

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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.

Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty

Mark Winne

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

Editorial Review:

In Closing the Food Gap, food activist and journalist Mark Winne poses questions too often overlooked in our current conversations around food: What about those people who are not financially able to make conscientious choices about where and how to get food? And in a time of rising rates of both diabetes and obesity, what can we do to make healthier foods available for everyone?

To address these questions, Winne tells the story of how America's food gap has widened since the 1960s, when domestic poverty was "rediscovered," and how communities have responded with a slew of strategies and methods to narrow the gap, including community gardens, food banks, and farmers' markets. The story, however, is not only about hunger in the land of plenty and the organized efforts to reduce it; it is also about doing that work against a backdrop of ever-growing American food affluence and gastronomical expectations. With the popularity of Whole Foods and increasingly common community-supported agriculture (CSA), wherein subscribers pay a farm so they can have fresh produce regularly, the demand for fresh food is rising in one population as fast as rates of obesity and diabetes are rising in another.

Over the last three decades, Winne has found a way to connect impoverished communities experiencing these health problems with the benefits of CSAs and farmers' markets; in Closing the Food Gap, he explains how he came to his conclusions. With tragically comic stories from his many years running a model food organization, the Hartford Food System in Connecticut, alongside fascinating profiles of activists and organizations in communities across the country, Winne addresses head-on the struggles to improve food access for all of us, regardless of income level.

Using anecdotal evidence and a smart look at both local and national policies, Winne offers a realistic vision for getting locally produced, healthy food onto everyone's table.

"Closing the Food Gap is a deeply moving account of Mark Winne's long career as an advocate for policies that will ensure adequate nutrition for the poor. Reading this book should make everyone want to advocate for food systems that will feed the hungry, support local farmers, and promote community democracy—all at the same time. I want all my students to read this beautifully written and important book."
—Marion Nestle, Paulette Goddard professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University, and author of Food Politics and What to Eat

"Mark Winne tackles the world of food deserts, hunger relief and the disparities of the 'haves' and 'have-nots' from both a personal and professional viewpoint that at once educates on and illuminates these very complicated issues. Winne makes these issues and their interrelationships not only understandable but also compelling for all those who care about social justice in our country."
—Chef Ann Cooper, author of Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children

"An engaging, candid, and sometimes funny look at how ordinary people—and extraordinary ones like the author—have struggled over three plus decades to create a fair food system, in the absence of public sector compassion. Winne has done it all—food coops, emergency feeding, farmers' markets, community gardening, Community Supported Agriculture, public policy. He tells us why and how, weaving into his own experiences stories from other cities across the country to create an essential picture of how people like him are struggling to reset the country's table for everyone."
—Joan Dye Gussow, author of This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader

"Closing the Food Gap reveals the chasm between the two food systems of America—the one for the poor and the one for everyone else. Speaking from his decades of political activism, Mark Winne offers compelling solutions for making local, organic, and highly nutritious food available to everyone. It's heartening to find a book that successfully blends a passion for sustainable living with compassion for the poor."
—Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE, Founder – the Jane Goodall Institute and UN Messenger of Peace


"By combining stories of his deep personal experience as an activist with keen insight into strategies for addressing food injustice, Winne himself fills a gap in the growing literature on good food, why it matters, and how to ensure everyone everywhere has access to it. Plus, the book is a fun read. Winne's stories made me want to meet him down at the local farmer's market, and then join him afterward for a cold beer."
—Anna Lappé, co-founder of the Small Planet Institute and author of Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen

"Winne's passion for justice and commitment to sustainability make this book essential reading for those who want to help make the vision of healthy abundance for all an American dream come true."
—Janet Poppendieck, author of Sweet Charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement