I liked how many real-life stories were included in the first half of this book. The second half focuses on his proposed solutions to poverty, which mostly consists of additional taxes, particularly on the wealthy.

His position did skew a bit liberal and political, and he made various comments that insinuated Democrats have always been kind and generous to the poor, while Republicans have always been selfish and stingy. This obvious bias left a bad taste in my mouth.

While I didn't agree with everything he said, he did give me some things to think about, and some of the solutions proposed would be fairly easy to implement - such as higher taxes for the very wealthy.

Though published fairly recently (2013), some of the information is already outdated as far as what aid is available and the restrictions for recipients.

"As the stories [of the poor] accumulated.... [what].... struck me with particular force... is the sheer loneliness of poverty, the fact that profound economic hardship pushes people to the psychological and physical margins of society - isolated from friends and relatives; shunted into dilapidated trailer parks, shanties, or ghettoized public housing; and removed from banks and stores, transit systems and cultural institutions. The poor live on society's scraps - a few dollars in government assistance or charity, donated food, thrift-store clothes. They can afford neither transport to venture out of their communities nor simple luxuries such as movies or a cup of coffee with friends in a cafe. They cannot afford to vary the routines of their daily lives. Embarrassed by their poverty, worried about being judged failures in life, and humiliated by that judgment, many told me that they have essentially withdrawn from all but the most necessary, unavoidable social interactions.

The second thing that one realizes in telling this story is the diversity, the complexity, of poverty. Its causes, and therefore its potential solutions, cannot meaningfully be reduced to a pat list of features." p 5

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nonfiction (sociology/politics). Extreme leftists would dismiss this as biased, but this wasn't written for them. It definitely provides more perspective on the consequences of various policies and the ways in which the poor and even the until-recently-middle-class have been affected by the economy and ill luck. The first half recounts dozens if not hundreds of stories of personal hardships; the second half offers some solutions for reshifting priorities and political funding, and fixing unhelpful social safety nets so that those in need might actually be able to lift themselves back up through them--all those ideas happen to be moot right now (and would've been a tough sell even if we had a more liberal-leaning Congress), but I still think it's important to get perspectives from some of these desperate, impoverished folks who've been ignored by their representatives for so long (and who maybe were only recently moved to exercise their vote). ( )

In 1962, Michael Harrington published The Other America, a sociological study of poverty in the US. Over 50 years later, we haven't made much progress in addressing this issue. Newspapers are filled with statistics about the growing inequality in the United States, and these statistics are striking. But Sasha Abramsky shares the stories and the voices behind the statistics, taking us across the US to meet real people who help to counter the stereotypes.

The second half of the book follows up the stories with policy recommendations for addressing this challenge. Abramsky contends that we have the resources needed to address poverty and concludes the book by commenting, "If, in the year 2062, another journalist has to revisit this issue again, to comment on poverty's stubborn presence on the American landscape a century after Harrington's cri de Coeur, it will be because of a failure of wills far more than a failure of intelligence or a lack of resources."

I thought this book was very well written. Although the two halves are almost like separate books, both contain important information. The stories provide an important face to the problems associated with poverty in the US, and the policy recommendations fill the need for specific solutions to these problems. However, the solutions are not necessarily designed to be bi-partisan. Because of this, it is likely that reactions may vary based on your political leanings. ( )