Review by Choice Review
Like David Shipler's 2004 The Working Poor (CH, Jul'04, 41-6656), this work by Abramsky (journalist and lecturer) interviews beleaguered Americans to paint a picture of "the American way of poverty" in 2013. His subjects suffer from bad luck but are also victimized by society's indifference (disproportionately reflecting the indifference of the wealthy 1 percent) and an institutional structure tilted against the poor. Unlike Shipler, Abramsky devotes a large portion of the book to prescribing his clearly liberal vision of a comprehensive anti-poverty program. His program relies on a variety of new and higher taxes (a financial transactions tax seems to be his favorite); increases in government spending on traditional safety net programs, along with such newer ideas as student loan forgiveness; support for homeowners and renters; expanded substance abuse treatment; an infrastructure bank; and regulatory measures such as incentives for employers to pay higher wages. He describes his program like an advocate would by emphasizing goals and benefits and overlooking or minimizing costs and trade-offs. However, his book is very well written, and the portraits of poor Americans are gripping. Summing Up: Recommended. All readership levels. R. S. Rycroft University of Mary Washington
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
VIRTUALLY EVERYTHING worthwhile written about American poverty is essentially about moral failure. It is the failure of the society (according to liberals) or of the poor themselves (according to conservatives) or of institutions and individuals together in a complex combination (according to centrists). Poverty violates core American values. It challenges the American dream's promise of prosperity for anyone who works hard, a faith central to the national ethic. Richard Wright called this faith "the truth of the power of the wish." The dream dies in the early pages of Sasha Abramsky's intricate study, "The American Way of Poverty." Abramsky, a freelance journalist who has written for The Nation, The Atlantic and other publications, regards inequality "as a social control mechanism" supported by financial interests' belief in "the desirability of oligarchy." He endorses the notion, popular on the left, that poverty is not just a glitch but a feature of the American system, "a corrosive brew," he writes, "capable of eating away at the underpinnings of democratic life itself." His observant reporting is less doctrinaire than these grand assertions. He travels the United States meeting the poor, whose wrenching tales he inserts in tight vignettes among data-driven analyses and acute dissections of government programs. The country he portrays is damaged by indifference at high levels - his American heroes are not in Congress or boardrooms - but is rescued here and there by caring citizens at the grass roots, their inventive programs achieving small successes. Abramsky presents himself as an heir to Michael Harrington, whose book "The Other America," published in 1962, awakened parts of the political establishment to the shadows of poverty beneath the country's gleaming affluence. But that work came during the civil rights movement, which was already sensitizing Americans to social injustice. Fifty-one years later, injustice does not readily incite outrage. This is so even as millions of middle-class Americans, in free fall during the economic collapse that began around 2008, have had a taste of what it means to be poor. The absence of a strong movement for change is striking, especially given the diversity Abramsky finds as he maps the landscape of poverty. "There are people with no high school education who are poor," he writes, "but there are also university graduates on food bank lines. There are people who are poor because they have made bad choices, gotten addicted to drugs, burned bridges with friends and family - and then there are people who have never taken a drug in their lives, who have huge social networks, and who still can't make ends meet." The destitute include those "who have never held down a job, and others who hold down multiple, but always low-paying, jobs, frequently for some of the most powerful corporations on earth." There are the chronically poor - "children whose only hot meals are what they are given at school" - and the newly poor who have lost the middle-class comfort of "huge suburban houses and expensive cars." Many of these people's wounds are intimate and invisible to outsiders. Frank Nicci, a chef in Pennsylvania who lost his leg to diabetes and his job to his ill health, could not even afford to pick up his 8-year-old son for their monthly custodial visits. Lorenza and Jorge Caro, living in a storage room in New Mexico, regularly ran out of propane during the winter and relied on herbs and Tylenol for medical treatment. A 40-year-old mother in California, laid off from her job, had reached the lifetime limit for welfare and so was denied benefits after she had a new baby; she became homeless, and her older son had to quit college to support her. A Hawaii woman named Emily could never free herself from the legacy of a family racked by alcoholism and violence. "What should we do," Abramsky asks, "with someone like Emily?" His answer is not to blame the victim, and he skewers conservatives for doing so. Whether poverty "is caused by dysfunction, or the dysfunction is itself a product of the poverty, or, as is likely, the dysfunction and the poverty interact in ever more complex feedback loops, for the larger community to wash its hands of the problem represents an extraordinary failure of the moral imagination." Abramsky has written an ambitious book that both describes and prescribes. He reaches across a wide range of issues - including education, housing and criminal justice - in a sweeping panorama of poverty's elements. Assembling them in one volume forces him to be superficial on occasion, but that price is worth paying to get the broad scope. In considering solutions, it's crucial to understand how the disparate problems of poor families interact in mutual reinforcement. Drawing from his own and others' ideas, Abramsky proposes a host of potential remedies, chiefly by government as the great mobilizer of financial resources for the "commons," by which he means common good, common assets and common sense. Poverty is less a "tragedy" than a "scandal," he declares, the result of "decisions taken, or not taken, by political and economic leaders" and accepted by voters. Different decisions can be made, he argues, if Americans have the will. He might have given more attention to the private sector, which creates most jobs, after all. But he believes there is plenty of room to tax upper incomes. Some of Abramsky's fixes are no-brainers: Let a struggling college student get food stamps even if she can't find a job, for example; don't make her quit school to be eligible. Finance school lunch programs for needy children flexibly, not just at the year's beginning, so a midyear recession that drives more families into poverty doesn't leave children hungry. If Abramsky had also traced the chain reaction of poor infant and childhood nutrition to impaired brain development and poor school performance, he would have strengthened his argument. The risk of stepping into the policy weeds is that you sometimes stumble, as Abramsky does in his bold proposal for an Educational Opportunity Fund. Comparable to Social Security and Medicare, it could provide as much as $20,000 for each child at birth, to grow over time into "a near-complete subsidy for their higher education," he writes. But even if $20,000 were to grow as fast as college costs, it would cover less than half of one year in the Ivy League, and only about a year at a state university. And according to Abramsky's plan, the fund would be financed by adding between 0.25 percent and 1 percent to the payroll tax, which is a regressive flat tax of the kind he denounces later in the book for hitting lowwage earners hardest. Those who don't go to college would get money from the educational fund as "a near-guarantee of economic security in old age," Abramsky writes. He also condemns federal cutbacks in funds for job training. But he does not lay out a plan for comprehensive vocational education, and he overlooks the increasing support for European-style apprenticeship programs being voiced by some American economists. Antipoverty measures need to help people who fall through the cracks of the private economy. Even with his book's few lapses, Abramsky has invited serious rethinking and issued a significant call to action. Meanwhile, the American dream remains the American myth. There are ways to alleviate poverty, Abramsky argues, if Americans have the will. DAVID K. SHIPLER is the author of "The Working Poor." His latest books are companion volumes on civil liberties: "The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades Our Liberties" and "Rights at Risk: The Limits of Liberty in Modern America."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 6, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
Not since the Great Depression have so many Americans been counted among the poor. Freelance reporter Abramsky explores poverty in America 50 years after Michael Harrington's groundbreaking book, The Other America. Abramsky offers historical perspective, detailing how poverty as well as social attitudes and public policy regarding poverty have changed. He points to the antitax policies of conservatives that have contributed to growing income inequality in the U.S. and growing concerns most evident in the Occupy movement and protest for the 99 percent versus the 1 percent. From Appalachia to Hawaii, from inner cities to rural areas, from families suffering intergenerational poverty to victims of the recent housing crisis, Abramsky's portraits of the poor illustrate three striking points: the isolation, diversity people with no jobs and people with multiple jobs and resilience of the poor. Drawing on ideas from a broad array of equality advocates, Abramsky offers detailed policies to address poverty, including reform in education, immigration, energy, taxation, criminal justice, housing, Social Security, and Medicaid, as well as analysis of tax and spending policies that could reduce inequities.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Destitution, squalor, loneliness, and despair are the distinctive features of lower-class America in this searing expose. Recalling Michael Harrington's The Other America, journalist Abramsky (Inside Obama's Brain) meets and profiles an extraordinary range of people and predicaments: indigent retirees at food pantries; Mexican migrant laborers in desert shantytowns; a middle-class professional woman reduced to prostitution after a spell of unemployment; low-wage workers unable to make ends meet and forced into a daily "'eat or heat'" dilemma. He shows us the persistence of brute hunger, homelessness, and deprivation, but also sensitively probes the psychic wounds-of being too poor to sustain friendships and social life, of feeling like a worthless cast-off in a society that worships wealth. The author sharply critiques the skimpy benefits and humiliating regulations of current welfare programs and lambastes conservatives who want to further shred the safety net. His prescription for a "Robin Hood" program-a laundry list of new entitlements, minimum-wage hikes, public works, and the like-lacks focus, but has the inestimable virtue of throwing money at people who sorely need it. Abramsky's is a challenging indictment of an economy in which poverty and inequality at the bottom seem like the foundation for prosperity at the top. Photos. Agent: Jim Levine, Levine Greenberg Agency. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An updating of Michael Harrington's influential 1962 report on poverty, The Other America, written in the hope that it, too, will launch a new war on poverty. For 18 months, freelance journalist Abramsky (Inside Obama's Brain, 2009, etc.), creator of the oral history project Voices of Poverty, traveled across more than half the states in the country to talk with the newly poor and the long-term destitute. These interviews, many of which can be heard on the project's website, form the bulk of the first part of the book, "The Voices of Poverty." They are accompanied by data from documented sources and hard statistics and by the author's analysis of what he discovered as he looked into such issues as jobs, wages, health care, housing and education. His portrait of poverty is one of great complexity and diversity, existential loneliness and desperation--but also amazing resilience. In the second section, "Building a New and Better House," Abramsky calls for basic changes in the economic landscape to reduce poverty. He bases his proposal on four major revenue sources: a public-works fund; an educational-opportunity fund; a poverty-mitigation fund backed by a financial transaction tax and energy profit taxes; and higher taxes on capital gains and high-end incomes and inheritances. He spells out in some detail just how this money could be used to bring about a more equitable social compact in America. The author sees this as a moral imperative that will require an informed, proactive electorate and a citizen-led push for reform. Abramsky's well-researched, deeply felt depiction of poverty is eye-opening, and his outrage is palpable. He aims to stimulate discussion, but whether his message provokes action remains to be seen.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
