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Poor people

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  • Date:
    Issued
    2014
    Summary:

    Pourquoi êtes-vous pauvres? (Why are you poor?) 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.

    Contents:
    • Self-definitions: I think I am rich
    • I think they are poor
    • Natalia's children
    • Everything you should do by yourself
    • The two mountains
    • Phenomena: Invisibility
    • Deformity
    • Unwantedness
    • Dependence
    • Accident-prone-ness
    • Paint
    • Numbness
    • Estrangement
    • Choices: Amortization
    • Crime without criminals
    • Snakehead fear
    • Hopes: "More aid, better directed"
    • The rider
    • Under the road
    • Dirty toilets
    • Placeholders: I know I am rich
    • I think you are rich
    • Money just goes to where it goes.
    Original Publisher: New York : Ecco, c2007
    Language(s): English