Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood, 3rd Edition

This book does a great job of investigating class structure in America by taking out the issue of race. The book explores urban poverty from both the White and Black perspective which allows students to engage the topic without adding the additional complexity of race. White urban poverty is not a topic that is often explored so this is an eyeopening book for many students.

When I was in college, I read several chapters of Ain't No Makin It as assigned reading for a sociology class. Years later, I came back to the book because I had frequently thought of it and wanted to reread it. Not only is the study enlightening, the writing is clear, insightful and elegant. MacLeod makes highly intelligent arguments without using pretentious language. His sense of metaphor is lovely, always helpful, and never a stretch. Overall, it is a humble body of work from someone who has every right to toot his own horn.

This book shows the lives of two groups of teens living in poverty and low-income areas. This book gives their perspective of the acheivement ideology and how everyone just is not meant to climb the ladder of social mobility.

This book gives an excellent insight into the lives of teenagers living in a low-income neighborhood. The book calls into question the American achievement ideology and forces the reader to reconsider his or her pre-concieved notions on poverty and its causes. The truth is that people aren't poor because they are lazy; they are poor because of numberous structural barriers in society that basicly trap them into poverty. This book is excellent for anyone interested in the social structure, but it would be better for someone who has never thought about the way society works and has the kind of closed-mindedness that cause many upper and middle-class people to view people of lesser social standing as lazy.

It's worthy to see the other side of USA, the myth of ideology really cheats many people.