Immagine dell'autore.

Sasha Abramsky

Autore di The House of Twenty Thousand Books

12 opere 678 membri 30 recensioni

Sull'Autore

Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist author, and a part time lecturer in the University Writing Program at the University of California, Davis. He is currently a senior fellow at Demos, the New York City-based think tank. His work or poverty was funded by a grant from the Open Society mostra altro Foundations' Special Fund for Poverty Alleviation. Abramsky lives in Sacramento, California. mostra meno

Comprende il nome: Sasha Abramsky

Fonte dell'immagine: Sasha Abramsky © Universidad de California

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I liked how many real-life stories were included in the first half of this book. The second half focuses on his proposed solutions to poverty, which mostly consists of additional taxes, particularly on the wealthy.

His position did skew a bit liberal and political, and he made various comments that insinuated Democrats have always been kind and generous to the poor, while Republicans have always been selfish and stingy. This obvious bias left a bad taste in my mouth.

While I didn't agree with everything he said, he did give me some things to think about, and some of the solutions proposed would be fairly easy to implement - such as higher taxes for the very wealthy.

Though published fairly recently (2013), some of the information is already outdated as far as what aid is available and the restrictions for recipients.

"As the stories [of the poor] accumulated.... [what].... struck me with particular force... is the sheer loneliness of poverty, the fact that profound economic hardship pushes people to the psychological and physical margins of society - isolated from friends and relatives; shunted into dilapidated trailer parks, shanties, or ghettoized public housing; and removed from banks and stores, transit systems and cultural institutions. The poor live on society's scraps - a few dollars in government assistance or charity, donated food, thrift-store clothes. They can afford neither transport to venture out of their communities nor simple luxuries such as movies or a cup of coffee with friends in a cafe. They cannot afford to vary the routines of their daily lives. Embarrassed by their poverty, worried about being judged failures in life, and humiliated by that judgment, many told me that they have essentially withdrawn from all but the most necessary, unavoidable social interactions.

The second thing that one realizes in telling this story is the diversity, the complexity, of poverty. Its causes, and therefore its potential solutions, cannot meaningfully be reduced to a pat list of features." p 5
… (altro)
 
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RachelRachelRachel | 2 altre recensioni | Nov 21, 2023 |
Charlotte "Lottie" Dod (she hated the moniker) is little known nowadays, except by tennis enthusiasts, but in her day she was one of the greatest all round female athletes of that, or indeed of any, day. She still holds the record as the youngest Wimbledon singles champion, when she took her first title aged 15 in 1887. She won it four more times and, no doubt, could have done so many more times as she had outclassed all her opponents through her use of strokes and techniques then unknown in the women's game. However, at the age of 21 she turned to new challenges and competed at a high level in a range of sports and activities, including ice skating, tobogganing, hockey, golf, mountaineering (where she climbed really challenging peaks in the Alps and Scandinavia) and archery, where she won a silver medal in the 1908 London Olympics. She was feted at the time, though seems to have fairly swiftly faded from the public consciousness, becoming less physically active as sciatica worsened. After the First World War, where she served as an volunteer nurse tending to wounded soldiers returned to Blighty, she started on her last major endeavour, choral music, in particular singing in, and administering, the Oriana Madrigal Society, the country's premier choral group, for which she was also feted. A spinster, as she aged she retreated into private life, but taught her brother's children to play tennis. She attended Wimbledon regularly until well into the 1950s. Retiring eventually to a nursing home in the New Forest, and having survived all her siblings, she passed away in 1960, almost the last of the generation of Victorian lady tennis players. Not only for her achievements on the tennis court, but for her wide ranging talents in a range of fields, the author describes her in her time as "hands down the most famous, most versatile and most accomplished female athlete on earth", but one who in later life had become a "silhouette", seen as "a distant memory from an impossibly long-gone era". She deserves to be remembered as a pioneer of female sport.… (altro)
 
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john257hopper | Jul 16, 2023 |
nonfiction (sociology/politics). Extreme leftists would dismiss this as biased, but this wasn't written for them. It definitely provides more perspective on the consequences of various policies and the ways in which the poor and even the until-recently-middle-class have been affected by the economy and ill luck. The first half recounts dozens if not hundreds of stories of personal hardships; the second half offers some solutions for reshifting priorities and political funding, and fixing unhelpful social safety nets so that those in need might actually be able to lift themselves back up through them--all those ideas happen to be moot right now (and would've been a tough sell even if we had a more liberal-leaning Congress), but I still think it's important to get perspectives from some of these desperate, impoverished folks who've been ignored by their representatives for so long (and who maybe were only recently moved to exercise their vote).… (altro)
 
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reader1009 | 2 altre recensioni | Jul 3, 2021 |
Questa recensione è stata scritta per Recensori in anteprima di LibraryThing.
I lent this book to a tennis-loving friend and he enjoyed it quite a bit. However, he only recently returned it to me... unfortunately it has taken some time for me to read & review. What a different time it was when Lottie lived -- and what a talented and fascinating woman she was! What I like most about the book was how it provided an unusual glimpse into the life of a woman who was born, grew up and came of age during Victorian & Edwardian times.
 
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RaucousRain | 11 altre recensioni | Dec 8, 2020 |

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Opere
12
Utenti
678
Popolarità
#37,272
Voto
3.8
Recensioni
30
ISBN
46
Lingue
4

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