The Working Poor: Invisible in America From:David K. Shipler , Knopf ,
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.5690973
EAN: 9780375408908
ISBN: 0375408908
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 336
Packaged Height: 110 hundredths-inches
Packaged Length: 930 hundredths-inches
Packaged Weight: 135 hundredths-pounds
Packaged Width: 660 hundredths-inches
Publication Date: 2004-02-03
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: 2004-02-03
Studio: Knopf
Product Description:
“Most of the people I write about in this book do not have the luxury of rage. They are caught in exhausting struggles. Their wages do not lift them far enough from poverty to improve their lives, and their lives, in turn, hold them back. The term by which they are usually described, ‘working poor,’ should be an oxymoron. Nobody who works hard should be poor in America.” —from the Introduction
From the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Arab and Jew, a new book that presents a searing, intimate portrait of working American families struggling against insurmountable odds to escape poverty.
As David K. Shipler makes clear in this powerful, humane study, the invisible poor are engaged in the activity most respected in American ideology—hard, honest work. But their version of the American Dream is a nightmare: low-paying, dead-end jobs; the profound failure of government to improve upon decaying housing, health care, and education; the failure of families to break the patterns of child abuse and substance abuse. Shipler exposes the interlocking problems by taking us into the sorrowful, infuriating, courageous lives of the poor—white and black, Asian and Latino, citizens and immigrants. We encounter them every day, for they do jobs essential to the American economy.
We meet drifting farmworkers in North Carolina, exploited garment workers in New Hampshire, illegal immigrants trapped in the steaming kitchens of Los Angeles restaurants, addicts who struggle into productive work from the cruel streets of the nation’s capital—each life another aspect of a confounding, far-reaching urgent national crisis. And unlike most works on poverty, this one delves into the calculations of some employers as well—their razor-thin profits, their anxieties about competition from abroad, their frustrations in finding qualified workers.
This impassioned book not only dissects the problems, but makes pointed, informed recommendations for change. It is a book that stands to make a difference.
Customer Reviews:
 A Valuable and Affecting Learning Experience, 2008-08-26
The poor are very visible in our society. What's far less visible is "The Working Poor", people who have jobs, but who face consistent problems of lower health,low income,no benefits,little education and training, single parenthood,and so on. Pulitzer Prize winning author David Shipler has done a marvelous research job giving flesh to problems many of us may think we have some handle on. After reading his outstanding book, I found that I hardly had a clue. Dozens of interviews have produced a truly heartrending, and sometimes hopeful tableau, of what it means to live on the edge.
This is an important book. I read segments of it to my college students --the parts that emphasize how easy it is to fall into the crevasses of the working poor by either not obtaining a college degree or by not getting training in a field with demand. I recommend this book highly to anyone and as a must read for anyone thinking about dropping out of school or a training program.
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