Ordinary Poverty: A Little Food and Cold Storage / Edition 1

by William DiFazio

Overview

At St. John's Bread and Life, a soup kitchen in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, more than a thousand people line up for breakfast and lunch five days a week. During the twelve-year era of welfare reform, William DiFazio observed the daily lives of poor people at St. John's and throughout New York City.

In this trenchant and groundbreaking work, DiFazio presents the results of welfare reform—from ending entitlements to diminished welfare benefits—through the eyes and voices of those who were most directly affected by it. Ordinary Poverty concludes with a program to guarantee universal rights to a living wage as a crucial way to end poverty. Ultimately, DiFazio articulates the form a true poor people's movement would take—one that would link the interests of all social movements with the interests of ending poverty.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781592134588
Publisher:	Temple University Press
Publication date:	02/28/2006
Series:	Labor in Crisis Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

What People are Saying About This

Jonathan Cutler

The heart and soul of Ordinary Poverty is the ethnography of St. John's Bread and Life soup kitchen. The greatest strength of the book, however, is the way in which DiFazio's text moves seamlessly from ethnography to high social theory and back again, in chapter after chapter of poignant prose and provocative analysis.