The Working Poor: Invisible in America | David K. Shipler | This should be required reading in US...

The Working Poor: Invisible in America | David K. Shipler | A Valuable and Affecting Learning Experience

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The Working Poor: ...

	The Working Poor: Invisible in America David K. Shipler Vintage, 2005 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 73 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

?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.

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This should be required reading in US high schools!

Having gone down my own path of working at minimum-wage jobs, being a single mother, receiving food stamps and Medicaid for a short time when my child was small and I had to be home with her, this was a poignant read. Since that time I was able to complete my degree and am gainfully employed.

That said, this is an excellent book that explores the realities the poor face, and hints at solutions. Shipler does a fine job of provoking thought about many of the questions around the big questions about why people aren't able to pull themselves out of poverty.

The book really should be an educational tool used at an age where school is mandatory. Had I read this book in high school, rather than college, perhaps I would've been more keenly aware of the path I should have taken in the first place. There is nothing like living through mistakes to teach, but this could come awfully close.

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A Valuable and Affecting Learning Experience

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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The Working Poor

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.

The Working Poor: Invisible in America

I THINK THIS BOOK WAS A REFRESHING LOOK AT THE PEOPLE WHO FALL BETWEEN THE CRACKS CREATED BY THE VARYING LEVELS OF SOCIAL STRATA. IT WAS AN EASY READ AND CONVEYED THE AUTHOR'S POINT VERY DEFINITELY WITHOUT BEING STUFFY.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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