Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I thought the book poorly written--not surprised he wrote it from a PhD dissertation. Without a doubt poverty is a major issue in the United States but this book did little to shed light on the causes and solutions. I found it interesting that the author was so critical of Sherrena taking vacations and making money off the poor and yet by his writing a book about the poor he also made money off them. The people he used as examples of poverty were not very sympathetic. Most, if not all, of them made poor choices contributing to their housing difficulties. There were too many references to actually read or find all of them. One that I did check regarding pg 293 (kindle edition) the author says: "Every year in this country, people are evicted from their homes not by the tens of thousands or even the hundreds of thousands but by the millions." He cites a reference by Chester Hartman which says: "The number is likely in the many millions, but we have no way of gauging even a moderately precise figure for renters, because such data are simply not collected on a national basis or in any systematic way in most localities where evictions take place." So much for the reference! This kind of imprecision is rampant in the book. It's pretty easy to be cynical about this book. A young academic typically writes scholarly papers, or better yet, a text book, derived from his dissertation. None of those make money, but contribute to the author's CV in the quest for tenure. He chose to write a popular screed that would make money instead. From the lack of rigor in this book, and the sloppy way he deals with statistics, you can see why he chose not to pursue a scholarly path with this material. One could conclude that he decided there is a market for "progressive exposes", and he could exploit it.