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Poor People

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Author: William T. Vollmann
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Category: Book

List Price: ~~$16.95~~
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Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 464
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 10.1 x 6.7 x 1

ISBN: 0060878843
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.5
EAN: 9780060878849
ASIN: 0060878843

Publication Date: February 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
p 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. /p p iPoor People/i 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. /p

Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

Poverty: The Deep Cuts April 9, 2008
If you imagine poverty as the planet's oceans, William Vollman is like a world-traveling fisherman who drops a line in wherever he happens to be and writes a chapter about whatever he pulls out. A quiet gem, Poor People is not, and does not attempt to be, a definitive authority on poverty. Vollman is discursive -- teleporting from one cultural vacuum to another, leaving nothing behind. Vollman's savage questions pound half-full and hapless and interview subjects alike, often proving nothing but the details of their own, even more savage poverty. There is no white-coat research, no Oxfam validation, no meticulously nuanced position to be debated in letters to The Nation. So far as positions, indeed whether Vollman ever takes much of a position on anything in Poor People in the end is itself difficult to discern, and what any such position might be a bona fide head-scratcher.br /br /So it is that Vollman makes a refreshingly raw break from the prosaic formulae of most contemporary sociological non-fiction. You know it: (i) settle upon a hypothesis to explain some social phenomenon; (ii) gather demonstrative anecdotal evidence; (iii) amass plausible statistics and quotes from credentialed sources to portray the anecdotal evidence as representative of larger patterns; then (iv) explain what the world ought to do with the alarming information you've presented. Voila! NY Times bestseller list. Takes a genuine talent like Vollman to smash that paradigm, and smash it he does: the language is hard, the evidence is harder, and somehow the point gets across. Help is most definitely NOT on the way.

4 out of 5 stars

Part John McPhee, part Hunter S. Thompson March 3, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

This is the first one of Vollmann's books I've read, and I really like the way he writes. He's like a cross between John McPhee and Hunter S. Thompson. His style is clear and highly readable, and occasionally he throws something outrageous in there, just to make sure we're still paying attention. He does talk about himself a lot, as one reviewer mentioned, but that's part of the point of the book. Poor People is partly an objective study of poverty, but it's really more about the author's attempt to explore his own attitudes about poor people. He's a complex character, so he doesn't wrap things up nicely with all the proper conclusions and a recipe for doing away with poverty, as one reviewer seems to believe he should have. In some ways, he concludes that there isn't much any of us can do about poverty, except perhaps spring for 750ml of decent booze for our favorite bum from time to time. I was disappointed that he never discussed the topic of untreated mental illness, which is rampant in the homeless population of this or any other country, and was clearly evident in many of the subjects he interviewed (yes, smarty, I AM an expert on the subject). He writes nearly as well as McPhee, but then he unapologeticly fires up a bowl of meth, ala Hunter S. Thompson. His style is definitely not for everyone, but for those who appreciate good gonzo, he's the genuine thing. Dude IS obsessed with whores.

5 out of 5 stars

Subnormality December 3, 2007
6 out of 6 found this review helpful

You may assume that this book is meant to be a cultural or social study of poor people, with an economic analysis of their hardships, and that seems to be the approach taken by most of the reviewers. But the book could be considered a work of modern philosophy, and if you look at it in this fashion, Vollmann's writing is strangely compelling and surprisingly effective. It's true that his style is difficult to penetrate, as he frequently goes off on dubious rhetorical tangents, obsesses over obscure and rambling literary references, and talks about himself way too much. Many readers will be reasonably turned off by Vollmann's very personality, but I propose that he has positioned himself as the comfortable "everyhuman" who knows that poverty is a problem but does not know how or whether to do anything about it. Thus he is a philosophical stand-in for the typical western reader of his book. br /br /And while his questions toward his subjects are presumptive and occasionally condescending, Vollmann also deftly avoids the scientist's trap of self-defined observation and lets the humanity of his subjects shine through. Vollmann also pulls off some fairly impressive journalism here as he strolls through fearsome world locations where anthropologists fear to tread, including the mobster-infested alleys of Tokyo and an array of bars and brothels. Another treasure of this book are the 128 photographs of Vollmann's subjects, which are often unflattering, but also unassuming and brutally realistic. I am particularly haunted by many of the photos of children. If this book were a strict cultural study of poor people that attempted to propose idealistic solutions to endemic economic inequalities, I would side with many of the other reviewers here and give it the thumbs-down for its rambling and immodesty. But as a work of philosophy, in which Vollmann explores why we don't have the answers and probably never will, the book is oddly powerful and incredibly thought-provoking. [~doomsdayer520~]

2 out of 5 stars

Asking the question he chooses to ask.... November 25, 2007
9 out of 9 found this review helpful

Vollman begins his book by subverting what he calls the Marxist paradigm of speaking about the poor....assuming what they want or need. Vollman speaks instead directly to his subjects...asking them quasi-naive questions. I read this book a few months ago and what has remained with me is a sense of something not quite achieved. I think Vollman approaches his subjects with compassion, but the way that he writes about them, the questions he ask are tainted in a way he never quite acknowledges....br /br /when you pay someone for an interview, someone who is significantly less powerful and important than yourself, then you are stuck with two problems. br /br /The first is that they will likely tell you what you want to know, instinctively reconfirming whatever your own prejudices or ideologies are....br /br /I'm not saying that Vollman should not have paid his subjects, but that he should expect that they shared details of interest to him, not necessarily to themselves. It is not as if they are writing their own narratives. In fact, although Vollman in the beginning talks about speaking directly to his subjects, a lot of the book focuses on his arguments with them on the page, if not in person, and explaining to the reader in his own words why they are poor. The story of the Chernobyl victim comes to mind. Most of Vollman's sentences are descriptive and do not have his subjects speaking in their own voices.br /br /Two, the primary question he focuses on, "Why are you poor?" perhaps ends up an embarassing question to ask over and over to people who may feel ashamed of the need to answer that question. Why does Vollman assume that his subjects know the answer to that question, or if they do know, that they will be able to tell him? If a poor person came to him to ask the question "why are you rich?" how would he answer?br /br /If Vollman explains why he is rich, I've forgotten it. Yet nature of the relationship between rich and poor is the deeper narrative Vollman seems to be grappling with. Are the rich rich because the poor are poor? Marx would say yes. Vollman doesn't ask the question. br /br /Vollman writes beautiful sentences , and yet in the end he seems a little too remote, too isolated from his subjects' experience to connect or to understand poverty on the level he seems to reach for. Some critics have accused him of having a poverty fetish and I think this points to a weakness. Is he writing about people who are poor or "poor people"?

4 out of 5 stars

Hard to read? Hardly. September 20, 2007
1 out of 6 found this review helpful

Mr. Vollmann writes book that I like to read. Toward the end of his work he says that he has been told that he writes stuff that is hard to read. Do he and I think alike? No, we do not. Mr. Vollmann is a writer. An author. I hope it doesn't hurt him too much.

Copyright 2007 White Hat Communications.
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