Nonfiction November: Focus on Poverty in the United States

We've all heard it, or some variation of it: "I don't give homeless people money because they should just get a job." What statements like this fail to acknowledge, however, is eternally complex question of the root causes of poverty; it is, unfortunately, no guarantee that a job will prevent you from being homeless, any more than it is a guarantee that being homeless means you have no job.

Though we have stopped the Dickensian tradition of jailing debtors, the stigma that accompanies poverty doesn't appear to be going anywhere anytime fast. But there are authors out there who are doing their damnedest to at least shed a light on some of the actualities of life in poverty, peeking beyond the myths and the stories and the stereotypes to see the people of poverty, the system of poverty, and the cycle of poverty:

The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, by Jeffrey Hobbs: Hobbs wrote this biography of his college roommate, Robert Peace, after Peace was murdered in the basement of a house in Newark, New Jersey, where he was working as a drug dealer after graduating from Yale with honors. Hobbs exploration of his friend's life is at once an attempt to understand how this young man, so seemingly poised for success despite overwhelming odds, ended up back where he started, as well as a study of the power of poverty in the United States today. Seriously, incredibly eye-opening. Full review.

Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich: Ehrenreich went "undercover" in 1998 to see what life was really like for those American workers putting in full-time hours (often more-than) in the "unskilled" jobs of our country. She worked at Walmart, she cleaned hotel rooms, she waited tables. She made readers reconsider how their everyday amenities--big box stores, hotel stays, the food on their tables--came to be, and nearly 20 years later, the book is just as important as it was in 1998. Which is saying something about how far--or not--the world of American poverty has come in the last 16 years, isn't it?

The Working Poor, by David K. Shipler: Shipler's book is similar to Ehrenreich's in that it explores not the most destitute, but those hovering just around the poverty line while working as hard as possible to make ends meet. I'm halfway through this one, and while some of the facts seem like they should be obvious, Shipler's support of assumptions with numbers and data and anecdotal evidence really brings things home.

Fire in the Ashes, by Jonathan Kozol: Subtitled "Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America", Kozol's newest book returns to the children he wrote about in Rachel and Her Children and Amazing Grace to share their "journeys and unexpected victories as they grow into adulthood."

Hand to Mouth: Living in Boostrap America, by Linda Tirado: I'm not even going to try to summarize this one, I'm just going to give you the jacket copy: "We in America have certain fixed ideas of what it means to be poor. Poor people live in shelters. They are on welfare. They go to soup kitchens. To some, poor people are lazy. And even the most enlightened of liberals have wondered aloud, 'Why do poor people make such bad choices?' Linda Tirado, in her signature frank yet personable voice, takes these preconceived notions of what it's like to be poor and smashes them to bits."

Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America, by Leon Dash: The story of Rosa Lee, a woman falling deeper and deeper into poverty in Washington, D.C. The book is based on a series of Washington Post articles that ran beginning in September of 1994, and though the title is less well-known today than others (Nickel and Dimed) of the same decade, I'm very much intrigued.

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Interestingly, most of the books about poverty that have come across my radar are a) written by white people (even though poverty disproportionately impacts non-white people in the United States (in 2012, the overall poverty rate in the US was 15%; for Whites, 9.7%; for Blacks, 27.2%; for Asians, 11.7%; for Hispanics (of any race), 25.6%))*, and b) are written from an outsider's perspective (even when said outsider is embedded deep within a group, as in Ehrenreich's case).

If anyone has suggestions for books that address the potential one-sidedness of this list, I'd love to hear them! In the meantime, rest assured that I'll be a-Googling this.

* Source: www.povertyusa.org

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This post is part of Nonfiction November's week 2 theme: Be/Become/Ask the Expert on a subject.