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A review by elerireads
Poverty Safari by Darren McGarvey
3.0
I feel quite conflicted about this book. In some ways it was incredibly powerful and provided a lot of insight into working class communities, child abuse and addiction, and the impacts that these can have on a person's life. The most effective parts were those directly discussing the author's life and the introspective analysis of his own agency over his life vs. his tendency to blame others or "the system". I thought a lot of the more general ideas and nuanced conclusions that he drew from his experiences were particularly important for someone like me to read, having zero personal experience of the life he was describing.
That said, some chapters of the book were broader reflections on society as a whole but a lot of the time just seemed to be sweeping generalisations with no reference to facts, stats, or interviews with other people. Discussion based on personal anecdote doesn't need any of these things, but without them the minute the scope is broadened it just feels like an opinion-based rant, which adds nothing to the book. It also seemed quite hypocritical, given that not dictating your values to groups you don't belong to is such a recurring (and totally valid) point that he keeps coming back to throughout the book.
Another gripe I have is that a lot of the very important terms that he uses all the time, such as poverty and working class, have no explanation of what he actually means by them and also just seem to be used to imply abusive, violent alcoholics and drug addicts. Whilst he was making lots of useful points about how all these things go together (because that was his experience), there was zero discussion of what they are as separate entities, which I feel just devalues a lot of what he has to say on the matter.
There are yet more terms that he uses without actually seeming to know what they mean at all; I had to stop reading his chapter about intersectionality to check the definition because what he was discussing bore so little resemblance to what I thought was meant by the term. A 30 second Google reassured me that I wasn't going mad and I hadn't been using the word incorrectly for years. You'd have thought he might also take those 30 seconds before writing a chapter long rant about it...? It seemed particularly rich coming from a white man who had thought to include nothing about the particular difficulties and experiences of working class women and people of colour.
Anyway, my own long opinion-based rant aside, I am very glad I read this book. It gave much food for thought (as you can see from the length of this review) and really did enrich my understanding of poverty in the UK, even if only really explaining one particular experience of it.
That said, some chapters of the book were broader reflections on society as a whole but a lot of the time just seemed to be sweeping generalisations with no reference to facts, stats, or interviews with other people. Discussion based on personal anecdote doesn't need any of these things, but without them the minute the scope is broadened it just feels like an opinion-based rant, which adds nothing to the book. It also seemed quite hypocritical, given that not dictating your values to groups you don't belong to is such a recurring (and totally valid) point that he keeps coming back to throughout the book.
Another gripe I have is that a lot of the very important terms that he uses all the time, such as poverty and working class, have no explanation of what he actually means by them and also just seem to be used to imply abusive, violent alcoholics and drug addicts. Whilst he was making lots of useful points about how all these things go together (because that was his experience), there was zero discussion of what they are as separate entities, which I feel just devalues a lot of what he has to say on the matter.
There are yet more terms that he uses without actually seeming to know what they mean at all; I had to stop reading his chapter about intersectionality to check the definition because what he was discussing bore so little resemblance to what I thought was meant by the term. A 30 second Google reassured me that I wasn't going mad and I hadn't been using the word incorrectly for years. You'd have thought he might also take those 30 seconds before writing a chapter long rant about it...? It seemed particularly rich coming from a white man who had thought to include nothing about the particular difficulties and experiences of working class women and people of colour.
Anyway, my own long opinion-based rant aside, I am very glad I read this book. It gave much food for thought (as you can see from the length of this review) and really did enrich my understanding of poverty in the UK, even if only really explaining one particular experience of it.