A New Solution...

to my complete and total inability to blog is to move closer to live blogging. So once a day, I'll say at least something if I'm reading. This should fix my current problem of rare updates.

So I've actually finished an entire book without blogging about it (shame on me). Title is The Working Poor by David K. Shipler. And I'll gladly admit I was attracted to it because it had "National Bestseller" on the cover. Now, I don't normally use this tactic for fiction, because that often leads you to purchase crap that everyone can read (i.e. chicklit, The Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter, etc.), and, while that's great and all, it's not particularly good writing. So venturing off the bestseller table for fiction is safe. Venturing away from non-fiction bestsellers is iffy at best. Most of the time the reason a non-fiction book is a best seller is not because it's poorly written, but because it's so well-written that people with a normal attention span can both read and understand it and not want to kill themselves from sheer ennui. Non-best selling non-fiction is often poison and makes you want to poke your eyes out. And I would know - I read it for the last four years.

Anyway, Shipler's book is different. He tackles the problems of the working poor by doing in-depth interviews with a few people over many years. He breaks the problems of the poor into a several interlocking parts, but each chapter is someone's story that magnifies one particular part of the problem. Unfortunately, there is no person who isn't a victim of multiple problems - that is one of the main points of his book. We can't just have better health care, we also need better education, job training, parent training, etc. to fix this huge problem. Such a complicated problem necessitates a complicated solution, so, in a lot of ways, most approaches have gone about helping people the wrong way. Yes, HeadStart is helpful, but it doesn't cure rampant sexual abuse, poor healthcare, bad parenting skills, or lack of job training. A multifaceted solution is needed for a multi-faceted problem.

Shipler's book could easily be depressing, that all the interconnecting problems pose a completely impossible situation with no hope of remedy. Instead, he actually shows glimpses of success in a variety of his case studies. And he's not overly sympathetic. He acknowledges that a lot of his subjects' situations exist because of their own mistakes, but that those mistakes are often rooted in self-perpetuating cycles and a general inability to see beyond the immediate future. I don't want to give much away, but it's a great read - go buy it if you want to read something that changes how you think.