I just finished reading The Working Poor - Invisible in America by David Shipler, Pulitzer Prize-Winning author of Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land which I would like to find soon. Maybe it will help me better understand what is going on over there. Here is a brief excerpt describing the population of people who are fully employed and working hard and yet live below the poverty level in the United States. “They help you find merchandise in Walmart; they wait on you in stores, harvest your food, clean your offices, sew your clothes. They package lights for your kids’ bikes and they assemble books of wallpaper samples to help you redecorate. . ."
"One little girl in the intensive care unit, [she] remembered, had an extreme allergy to cats. The family had a cat. We said, ‘Oh, you really need to get rid of the cat. The child’s really allergic to the cat, and we think that’s part of the reason she has these really bad asthma attacks.’ And the parents looked at me dead on and said, “But the cat kills the rats.’ Clearly the house was the problem, but the solution was part of another problem.”
I would recommend this book to anyone. It will open your eyes and give you a new perspective on being poor in America, not unlike Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich.
