Dr. Michael L. Johnson author of "What Do You Do When the Medications Don't Work?--A Non-Drug Treatment of Dizziness, Migraine Headaches, Fibromyalgia, and Other Chronic Conditions".A superb investigation of the problem of American poverty There have been a number of important books recently on the American working poor, notably Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed," Shulman's "Betrayal of Work," and now Shipler's "The working poor". In many ways, Shipler's is the most comprehensive of the three. He does a superb job blending ethnographic and interview material with legal and sociological research, and paints a compelling picture of poverty as a web of interlocking causes and effects that is deceptively easy to fall into and difficult to struggle free from. In many ways, the most remarkable thing about the book is Shipler's ability to see and portray the same situation from a variety of perspectives: welfare-to-work employment incentive programs from the eyes of both employer and employee, or drug rehabilitation from the eyes of both addict and rehab center worker. And it's not a partisan book: Shipler shows how there's never just one direction to point the finger of blame, and how the web has to be attacked from more than one direction to truly be cut and free those who are ensnared.
I highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone who seeks to understand the class system of the United States.