A review by agenender
The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David K. Shipler

4.0

Really fascinating (and heartbreaking) account of how and why people get stuck in a cycle of poverty. Shipler outlines the causes of poverty through interviews with a couple dozen people, and their stories are a patchwork of bad personal choices, bad luck, poor health, poor education, drugs, physical and/or sexual abuse, inherited conditions, government policies, and societal ills that land or imprison these folks in what is for many of them a permanent state. I have found myself thinking about these people off and on since the day I started the book. Most of the book consists of these stories, but the last chapter is an overview of possible "fixes." The transition from the stories to Shipler's ideas on how to help is jarring, but I'm not sure how he could have done it differently unless he had just let the interviews tell the story and left out the last chapter. This book made me think, and continues to do so, more than any book that I've read in the last few years.