The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781568584607)

Selected as A Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review

Fifty years after Michael Harrington published his groundbreaking book The Other America, in which he chronicled the lives of people excluded from the Age of Affluence, poverty in America is back with a vengeance. It is made up of both the long-term chronically poor and new working poor -- the tens of millions of victims of a broken economy and an ever more dysfunctional political system. In many ways, for the majority of Americans, financial insecurity has become the new norm.

The American Way of Poverty shines a light on this travesty. Sasha Abramsky brings the effects of economic inequality out of the shadows and, ultimately, suggests ways for moving toward a fairer and more equitable social contract. Exploring everything from housing policy to wage protections and affordable higher education, Abramsky lays out a panoramic blueprint for a reinvigorated political process that, in turn, will pave the way for a renewed War on Poverty.

It is, Harrington believed, a moral outrage that in a country as wealthy as America, so many people could be so poor. Written in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, in an era of grotesque economic extremes, The American Way of Poverty brings that same powerful indignation to the topic.

Author: Sasha Abramsky
ISBN-10: 1568584601
ISBN-13: 9781568584607
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Language: English
Published: 08/26/2014
Pages: 368
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.50w x 1.10d

Review Citation(s):
New York Times Book Review 09/14/2014 pg. 28