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A review by angiew23
Abundance by Jakob Guanzon
5.0
Abundance tells the story of a fictional man named Henry who has struggled his entire life with addiction and poverty. After being released from jail he struggles to find a way to support his young son Junior while they are living in his truck and he is desperately trying to find work. The story also time hops to his childhood, young adult life, and to when Junior was very young.
The first thing that appealed to me about this book was that each chapter was titled with a dollar amount which pointed out exactly how much money the main character Henry had at that point in time. This is a really nice visual in both the miniseries and Abundance because it shows that poverty actually requires you to have a lot of money. For example, in Abundance, Henry pays money for a hotel room so that he can have a proper shower and a nice clean suit before his job interview. In order to hopefully get a job, he needs to pay money that someone who is not homeless would not have to do.
This book is hard to read at times. You will want to scream at Henry and at the world. But it is also a really important read. We live in a world where there is a cycle of poverty that is almost impossible to break. In order for society to develop empathy for those less fortunate, we need to fully understand what causes poverty and what limits those in poverty from overcoming it. By reading real and fictional stories like this one, perhaps more people will begin to understand a life they have not lived and can work towards helping community members break out of that cycle. Please read this book.
The first thing that appealed to me about this book was that each chapter was titled with a dollar amount which pointed out exactly how much money the main character Henry had at that point in time. This is a really nice visual in both the miniseries and Abundance because it shows that poverty actually requires you to have a lot of money. For example, in Abundance, Henry pays money for a hotel room so that he can have a proper shower and a nice clean suit before his job interview. In order to hopefully get a job, he needs to pay money that someone who is not homeless would not have to do.
This book is hard to read at times. You will want to scream at Henry and at the world. But it is also a really important read. We live in a world where there is a cycle of poverty that is almost impossible to break. In order for society to develop empathy for those less fortunate, we need to fully understand what causes poverty and what limits those in poverty from overcoming it. By reading real and fictional stories like this one, perhaps more people will begin to understand a life they have not lived and can work towards helping community members break out of that cycle. Please read this book.