The Other America

During the 1950s, the poor were invisible; during the 1960s & 70s they were to be pulled up by the Great Society programs; during the 1980s they became the enemy of President Reagan and the middle class; during the 1990s and 2000s the poor have become clowns to laugh at on the "Jerry Springer Show". This book lends significant and valuable insight into poverty; not just economic poverty but "psychological" poverty. Although this book was written over forty years ago, much of the main ideas still seem to hold true. Instead of looking at today's poor Americans as "lazy welfare bums" we must look at the deep psychological and sociological subculture that is their situation. Harrington makes many interesting observations in this regard. The book is also very well written and researched. Please do not dismiss this book because of the author's liberal and socialistic political leanings. Take it for what it is. In any case, it will give you a lot to think about.

Not being an American, I cannot judge whether the poverty situation described in this book is still as prevalent as it was in the early 1960's. I found the book to be a good and easy read, the author was able to get his point across and made some good suggestions. An important book that I am glad I read.

What is most amazing about Harrington's book is how accurately it describes today's society. The impact of this book, first published in the early 60s, is testament to the power that a single book can have on a nation and its people. It directly affected the thoughts and actions of President Johnson's "war on poverty". Unfortunately, this "war on poverty" may never come to a conclusion, even in the richest country in the world. The book itself contains a good introduction by Howe, who puts the impact of Harrington's work in context. Filled with statistics, which are unfortunately not well referenced, the case is made that the scale of poverty in the US is a travesty and an outrage. Harrington himself lived amongst the poor and disenfranchised members of New York's society for a brief period of time and he writes about their general hopelessness and lack of purpose in life. The descriptions and analysis of this book allow you to view the world through the 'lens' of poverty, to know (on a superficial level) the crippling and depressing lives of our society's poorest members. Harrington was perhaps the leading American socialist of his time, so be warned that his views and crituqes have a liberal/leftist stance and that much of the book disparages the efforts of the US government (perhaps, rightly so). As an added bonus, this edition of the book includes some insightful afterwords by Harrington about poverty in the 70s and 80s. Overall, an important and powerful work that is a must-read for anyone concerned with the issue of poverty in the US (which should be everyone, shouldn't it?).

This is the seminal work on the poor in America, analyzed within the context of government proffered, anti-poverty programs. It is a scathing critique and analysis of the war on poverty, where bold rhetoric and political grandstanding have often supplanted action. The author in his analysis categorizes poverty as a cultural and often institutional way of life that would require radical innovations, social planning, and long term financial investment, were the government really serious about eradicating poverty in America. What is amazing is that the arguments made by the author, when he wrote this book forty years ago, are still sound today.

Few works of contemporary non-fiction have had more lasting impact on the social consciousness of the overall society from which it arose than "The Other America", Michael Harrington's now classic tome on the egregious conditions under which what we would now call the "underclass" lived in mid-20th century American society. With an uncommon verve and uncanny precision, Harrington painstakingly detailed the disgusting and shocking realities of life for those many millions of Americans of both color and ethnicity living lives of desperate poverty in the midst of the affluent society. Millions of readers, myself included, were shocked to discover the extent to which this world coexisted with our own, and many of the social action programs that arose in the 1960s and thereafter used this book as a kind of reference guide to the realities of poverty in contemporary society. Indeed, what is most disturbing about anyone re-reading the book is the discovery of how little conditions have changed for those who through the accident of birth, color, and ethnic origin, find themselves inexorably trapped in the vicious cycle of poverty. Sadly, for all the glad-handing of politicians and the proclamations by global corporations of the new and more widespread prosperity of the 1990s, the sobering truth is that very little progress has been made. Indeed, in more recent books such as William Finnegan's excellent "Cold New World", Harrington's basic thesis of the co-existence of a starker, poorer, and powerless populace left stranded to live lives of quiet desperation is reconfirmed, putting the lie to the many proclamations of universal opportunity and promise that politicians now ballyhoo. The book, which was first published in the early 1960s, was required reading for most introductory sociology and contemporary history courses, and millions of young academics first learned of the extent of the national problem through a reading of this book. It is, in that sense at least, a modern classic. Harrington's basic thesis is incontrovertible; poverty is extensive and endemic, and is usually hidden from the view of most affluent Americans due to the ways in which the two subcultures coexist in modern society. Through the de-facto residential segregation of the two elements of the society, there is little meaningful contact, and the media tends to ignore the facts of the existence of the underclass, portraying arch-types which conform more to the sensibilities of the more affluent segments of the society that regularly view its programming and enforcing unrealistic images of what exists. As a previous reviewer commented, we no longer habituate the same environments, and we tend to avoid all unnecessary contact with anything to do with this other world of poverty and want. What Harrington originally described in such anguished and inflammatory terms, hoping to purposefully ignite America's slumbering conscience, has instead become a permanent feature of our conscien