Rating: 
Summary: trash
Review: Some trash I had to read for school. Don't waste your time or money.
Rating: 
Summary: Compelling format for a difficult, yet critical message
Review: The life stories of each of these people really tear at your heart. While many have made mistakes in life, they live in a world where there is no recovery from even the slightest event.
Shipler's narrative is a very compelling format. It is similar to the approach that Molly Ivins uses in "Bushwacked". Rather than talking about a problem in an abstract, academic manner, they use real stories about real people to help you understand the impact of these events on others.
The approach here is one that the DNC would do well to pay attention to. When you look at how the country responded to Bill Clinton as opposed to Al Gore and John Kerry, it's clear that telling personal stories works. Ronald Reagan used it equally effectively. If the left is to get its message across, it needs its candidates to become effective storytellers, telling the stories of people like Shipler's Caroline, who did everything right - working overtime, going to college and saving money to buy a house only to find that she had no safety net when she had to make critical decisions to care for her (mildly) retarded daughter.
To the reviewer who complains that Shipler doesn't emphasize religion and private charities as the solution, I answer that the problems described in this book are not solveable by having charities pitch in to provide meals or clothes. These are structural deficiencies in our economic system. These people are not "charity cases". In most instances, they are people who work hard and need to be supported by an infrastructure that rewards their efforts and gives them a path to self-sustenance. Our current system, despite claims of "compassionate conservatism" does neither.
Rating:
Summary: "It is time to be ashamed."
Review: The sentence above is how David K. Shipler ends his heart-rending work on the invisible citizens of America--namely, the working poor. He is absolutely correct.The people he writes about are the ones who sew your clothes, do your gardening, pick your crops, hand you coffee at the local convenience store. They are your neighbors, your fellow citizens, maybe some of them are even your friends and relatives. Shipler addresses the interconnected problems of poverty in a way that is informative and far from impersonal. As you read, you can't help but feel for those he writes about, and you may even find yourself thinking: "There but for the grace of God..." Get it, read it, then do what you can to improve this situation in our great country.
The very first, and simplest, thing you can do is: vote. Reviewer: Linda Painchaud
Rating: 
Summary: The un heard
Review: The Working Poor: Invisible in America gives you a personal outlook on how many Americans live there lives in the lower class. It opens your eyes and shows that every little person counts. This gives you a whole new respect of the people who scan your groceries or the people that let you have it your way at Burger King. David Shipler gives you a real life story and breaks down the struggles and hardships that the lower working class must go through day in and day out just to get by in society where the most important people are over looked. This book deserves to be read not just to here about poor people struggling but to understand how many Americans have to survive in the life of poverty.
Rating:
Summary: Spoiled by a Desire for "Balance"
Review: This is one of the best books about poverty to have come out in recent years. Shipler writes beautifully and he is one of the few writers on the subject who has been able to shift almost effortlessly from anecdotal stories to the "big picture".
His basic thesis is entirely free of the sanctimonious BS one usually hears from both right and left: yes, poor people do make a lot of bad decisions, but then again so does everyone else. Rich people, however, are generally insulated from the effects of their bad decisions by their wealth and/or social connections, attributes which also tend to naturally put them in positions where it is easier to make good decisions.
If Shipler had stuck with this basic thesis, I could have given this book 5 stars. But somewhere along the way it seems that Shipler falls prey to the journalistic malady of "finding balance". This, of course, is immediately taken to mean that he, the author, should write something which "challenges both left and right". The above-mentioned thesis thus gets banged around and Shipler ends up with a confused message.
The worst parts of the book are when Shipler interviews supervisors and other non-poor people. Suddenly his BS meter seems not to work anymore. While Shipler is a master of explaining the mistakes and self-deceptions of the poor, he cannot seem to say anything even remotely critical about the actions of the employers with whom he talks. Everything they say gets taken at face value, even patent absurdities such as when a Proctor and Gamble spokesman tells him that the reason the company cannot have more regular working hours is that it would be bad for workers' career prospects not to be able to work with all three shift supervisors! This, mind you, after just explaining at length how the irregular working hours were causing serious havoc with the life of a single mother. Shipler sets aside his good journalistic instincts and feeds us this nonsense as a "reasonable" statement. The author is a bit too worshipful of the dictates of the "free market", accepting the employers' claims of being "helpless" as patently true, even though he knows little or nothing about the industries involved.
If we should expect the poor to take responsibility for their lives and be active moral agents, why not extend that same requirement to those a bit up the income ladder? This is a book about poverty whose main (and pretty much only) fault is that it doesn't examine wealth at all.
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