![]() ![]() It's a jigsaw puzzle of causes and effects that might start with fractured families and poor parenting skills and take a turn through crack addiction. ![]() The second theme is that poverty - which falls disproportionately on women (especially single mothers) - isn't "a" problem. This is, in Barbara Ehrenreich's words, "the involuntary philanthropy of the working poor." From the migrant laborers who pick Pennsylvania apples and Florida oranges to Wal-Mart shelf-stockers and low-paid office clerks, "he country's prosperity relies on badly paid workers," writes Shipler, a former New York Times correspondent and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. ![]() The first is that though the American way of life celebrates the twin myths of hard work and class mobility, it depends utterly on the low wages and hard times of those at the bottom of society's pile. In fact, Shipler's ambitious journalistic study, The Working Poor: Invisible in America, makes two points that can't be stressed enough for anyone thinking seriously about poverty, hunger and homelessness. Shipler witnesses in his moving, thorough and quietly passionate new book, to merely be employed doesn't guarantee you anything - even in the richest country in the world. For a problem as complex as poverty, there is no simple solution. ![]()
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