Poor People

Front Cover
Harper Collins, Oct 5, 2010 - Social Science - 464 pages
4 Reviews
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That was the simple yet groundbreaking question William T. Vollmann asked in cities and villages around the globe. The result of Vollmann's fearless inquiry is a view of poverty unlike any previously offered.

Poor People struggles to confront poverty in all its hopelessness and brutality, its pride and abject fear, its fierce misery and quiet resignation, allowing the poor to explain the causes and consequences of their impoverishment in their own cultural, social, and religious terms. With intense compassion and a scrupulously unpatronizing eye, Vollmann invites his readers to recognize in our fellow human beings their full dignity, fallibility, pride, and pain, and the power of their hard-fought resilience.

Some images that appeared in the print edition of this book are unavailable in the electronic edition due to rights reasons.

 

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LibraryThing Review

User Review  - arubabookwoman - LibraryThing

Vollman, winner of the National Book Award for Europe Central, spent a number of years travelling the world and interviewing people who by most standards would be considered poor. He asked them the ... Read full review

POOR PEOPLE

User Review  - Kirkus

National Book Award-winning novelist and journalist Vollmann (Europe Central, 2005, etc.) asks street people why they think they're poor. Most have no answer.The author doesn't either, though he ... Read full review

Contents

Natalias Children
49
Everything You Should Do by Yourself
81
The Two Mountains
93
Invisibility
103
Deformity
123
Dependence
131
Pain
141
Estrangement
153
Crime without Criminals
173
Snakehead Fear
197
More Aid Better Directed
221
Under the Road
237
Dirty Toilets
255
Money Just Goes to Where It Goes
293
Acknowledgments
315
Copyright

Amortization
165

Other editions - View all

Poor People
William T. Vollmann
Limited preview - 2007
Poor People
William T. Vollmann
No preview available - 2008

Common terms and phrases

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About the author (2010)

William T. Vollmann is the author of seven novels, three collections of stories, and a seven-volume critique of violence, Rising Up and Rising Down. He is also the author of Poor People, a worldwide examination of poverty through the eyes of the impoverished themselves; Riding Toward Everywhere, an examination of the train-hopping hobo lifestyle; and Imperial, a panoramic look at one of the poorest areas in America. He has won the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction, a Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize and a Whiting Writers' Award. His journalism and fiction have been published in The New Yorker, Esquire, Spin and Granta. Vollmann lives in Sacramento, California.

Bibliographic information

QR code for Poor People
TitlePoor People
AuthorWilliam T. Vollmann
Editionreprint
PublisherHarper Collins, 2010
ISBN006204379X, 9780062043795
Length464 pages
Subjects ›  › 

History / Social History
Philosophy / Social
Political Science / Public Policy / Social Services & Welfare
Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural & Social
Social Science / Poverty & Homelessness
  
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