Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book makes me want to thank my mother, profusely, for everything she did for me/us while I was growing up. Until reading this exposé, I hadn't really realized that some of her own strategies *were* actually strategies -- I just thought that, for example, going to the library a few times a week was what everyone did. It also made me think to the time I spent living in the Bronx during grad school (yes!), making dismal adjunct wages relative to New York City living conditions. My neighbors would occasionally see me out reading on my stoop -- not making dinner --, and one family in particular paid special attention: even though the 3 of them (a mother, father, and teenage daughter) lived in a one-bedroom apartment, they often brought me a plate of whatever meal they had made. I knew that they did not have much, but of course to refuse the meal would be rude (and besides, the food was hearty and delicious). Since meeting them, I have had a soft spot for the supposed "lazy" people who get government subsidies. Some, like the family I knew, made do fairly well with what they had. Others, such as the people featured in this book, could only *wish* they had enough food to share. In some senses, $2 A Day preaches to the choir; it's likely that those who are buying and reading the book 1) aren't in the position of its case studies, 2) already know there's a problem with how America's poor are "dealt with," and 3) are already fairly sympathetic to the issues that this volume addresses. But in many other ways, the book is, not to sound too cliché, a revelation. For one, the notion that "we, as a country, aren't spending less on poor families than we once did. ... In fact, we now spend much more" struck me in particular, and signals that the very readership the book probably targets are also probably the most able and willing to address the problems. While the book sometimes veers into moderately-lengthy analyses of government policies, which might tire some readers, I feel that it presents a good mixture between these and the case studies showing these policies "at work," so to speak. I don't think this book will be the next Freshman Read, but I do think it can hold its own in the roster of readable sociology texts for perhaps the next decade. (Hopefully, the next book coming out won't present a worse picture of things.) If anything, it makes one think about what one has, or hasn't had.