Selected Product:
| The Working Poor: Invisible in America
Paperback
Author: David K. Shipler
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 2005-01-04
ISBN-10: 0375708219
ISBN-13: 9780375708213
List Price: $14.95
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
“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.
Thanksgiving Day, 2008
| Customer Rating: | | On this Thanksgiving Day, I reflected on the fact that I am part of an interdependent society, and that the work and circumstances of many people made my own life possible. "Working Poor" by David Shipler illustrates how things people take for granted, from plastic bags to clothes to carpets come to us through the hard work of low-wage workers. Shipler does not engage in sociological analysis, but gives case studies of individuals, who have to struggle to make ends meet, work long hours, and through circumstances both within and beyond their control, are left out of opportunities (i.e., college education) that are available to others. It seems to me that in our country, we need to find a balance between personal and social responsibility, and lately we have lost sense of the latter. I highly recommend this book so that we can at least have a conversation about how to better strike that balance and give more Americans better opportunities and a better quality of life. |
Goes too much into the boring details
| Customer Rating: | | In this book you should not expect to find any outlines of how unjust the economical system in America is, nor any suggestions what should be done about it. There is only numerous short stories about the lives of the working poor. Expect to read how certain individuals spent $10 on this, and $4 on that, and how they couldn't pay their medical bills, etc... I think the author goes too much into the boring details. |
A Valuable and Affecting Learning Experience
| Customer Rating: | 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. |
What happened?
| Customer Rating: | | I never received the book, so I don't know how I can review it. Do you have any logical suggestions? |
The Working Poor
| Customer Rating: | | The book was excellent. It gave me an intelligent insight of the struggles of so many Americans who can't deal with the American Dream. |
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