Ordinary Poverty

"This is a book written by a frustrated and angry man [who] spent nearly 20 years working as a volunteer in the Bread and Life soup kitchen.[it] is an attempt to make sense of that experience .. DiFazio does not have all the answers. But he asks the right questions and puts poverty and hardship back at the centre of discussion. He challenges us to face up to our responsibility to act. Inequality and low wages are key issues which have been ignored for too long-in Britain as in America." The Tribune "DiFazio has made a clear critique of current poverty theories, policies, and responses...this is a provocative and illuminating synthesis that urges students, scholars, researchers, advocates, activists, and policymakers to think and act outside our current poverty definitions, theories, and policies, the structure of our advocacy and helping organizations, and the overall national and global economy in which these are set." Contemporary Sociology "The book presents a cogent analysis of poverty gleaned in part from the author's work at St. John's Bread and Life soup kitchen in Brooklyn. His interviews, observations, and social analysis powerfully rebut those social theorists and politicians who argue that people are poor out of cultural or personal inferiority." - Socialism and Democracy "Ordinary Poverty is an astute book that stands out from most of the work that is published on poverty and anti-poverty activism. It is far better theoretically informed than most of that work and its dual emphasis...provides the likely demands for a rejuvenated anti-poverty movement headed by the poor." Labour/Le Travail "DiFazio offers an outraged exegesis of the exacerbation of poverty amid an economic boom that has increased the wealth of only the richest...His ethnographic contribution is strongest in his description of the travails of long-term social service provision in the late 1980s and into the 1990s." The American Journal of Sociology "This estimable book is at once an ethnographic account of the author's experiences from 1988 to 2001 as a volunteer field worker for the St. John's Bread and Life soup kitchen in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn... DiFazio's proposals for solving the problem of poverty in the United States are not new...but they acquire a fresh relevance... One of the strengths of this book is its vivid portraits of the people whose poverty has become 'ordinary' inasmuch as present-day capitalist America looks upon their existence as a normal part of the social fabric... Ordinary Poverty is an impassioned, politically engaged, intellectually challenging study of one of the central unresolved problems of American social and political life." Science & Society, April 2009