Content area
Full Text
A People's History of Poverty in America. By Stephen Pimpare. (New York: New Press, 2008. xiv, 322 pp. $27.95, ISBN 978-1-56584-934-L)
Stephen Pimpare, the author of The New Victorians: Poverty, Politics, and Propaganda in Two Gilded Ages (2004) is well qualified to write this book, part of the New Press People's History series edited by Howard Zinn. Pimpare 's focus is on poverty in America - from the colonial era to the present - from the perspective of the poor. His intended authence is readers who do not appreciate the struggles that impoverished Americans have endured over time. "There is a general ignorance," he writes, "about the lives led by poor Americans, an ignorance, whether real or feigned, that shapes public discourse about poverty and welfare,...