The Other America: Poverty in the United States

by Michael Harrington

Paperback, 1973

Status

Available

Call number

305.560973

Genres

Collection

Your library

Publication

Pelican / Penguin (1973), Paperback, 202 pages

Description

In the fifty years since it was published, The Other America has been established as a seminal work of sociology. This anniversary edition includes Michael Harrington's essays on poverty in the 1970s and '80s as well as a new introduction by Harrington's biographer, Maurice Isserman. This illuminating, profoundly moving classic is still all too relevant for today's America. When Michael Harrington's masterpiece, The Other America, was first published in 1962, it was hailed as an explosive work and became a galvanizing force for the war on poverty. Harrington shed light on the lives of the poor--from farm to city--and the social forces that relegated them to their difficult situations. He was determined to make poverty in the United States visible and his observations and analyses have had a profound effect on our country, radically changing how we view the poor and the policies we employ to help them.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member JBreedlove

A look at the underside of the American dream.

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LibraryThing member pitjrw

My original copy of The Other America with it's prolific empty highlighting and the vacuous notes of a college freshman of 50 years ago is long gone. The current copy was picked up at a library sale to be part of my project to re-read years later those books I had loved when a youth. My re-reading

took place at the second point in my political life when a self proclaimed socialist was making a recognizable contribution to the public policy discussion in the US. Most of what Barney Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and other commentators on the income gap or the 99% vs. the 1% was already said by Harrington half a century ago. Harrington wrote with a clarity and urgency that others writing on the subject have lacked. Most strikingly different was the optimism he had that something could, would be done about poverty in America. Surprisingly that optimism was not entirely unwarranted. While exaggerated claims for the War on Poverty cannot be sustained, there was a real - if inadequate - response from government and American society that this book was instrumental in evoking.

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LibraryThing member Waltersgn

Class work on poverty in the U. S. which is still relevant 50 years later

LibraryThing member arosoff

This is a depressing read because it's nearly 60 years old and yet so much of it is still true. LBJ's War on Poverty did lessen poverty, especially amongst the elderly. But too many of us believe in Reagan's quip that "we waged a war on poverty, and poverty won"--cutting benefits and giving up.

Harrington's book still articulates the problems with conservative thinking on poverty, and his analyses of rural areas and black poverty still have a great deal of truth today.

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LibraryThing member LukeGoldstein

As important today, or possibly more so, than when it was written over fifty years ago. Any outrage over the shocking numbers inside can only be multiplied today by the sheer fact of national avoidance of the problem.

LibraryThing member m.belljackson

Michael Harrington delivered a classic rendering and attack on Poverty in America in the 1960s
which led to The War on Poverty.

It would have been great if it had succeeded.

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