Synopses & Reviews
because i was bad in my last life.
because allah has willed it.
because the rich do nothing for the poor.
because the poor do nothing for themselves.
because it is my destiny.
These are just some of the answers to the simple yet groundbreaking question William T. Vollmann asks in cities and villages around the globe: Why are you poor? In the tradition of James Agee's
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Vollmann's
Poor People struggles to confront poverty in all its hopelessness and brutality, its pride and abject fear, its fierce misery and its quiet resignation.
Poor People allows the poor to speak for themselves, explaining the causes and consequences of their impoverishment in their own cultural, social, and religious terms.
There is the alcoholic mother in Buddhist Thailand, sure that her poverty is punishment for transgressions in a former life, and her ten-year-old daughter, whose faith in her own innocence gives her hope that her sin in the last life was simply being rich. There is the Siberian-born beggar who pins her woes on a tick bite and a Gypsy curse more than a half century ago, and the homeless, widowed Afghan women who have been relegated to a respected but damning invisibility. There are Big and Little Mountain, two Japanese salarymen who lost their jobs suddenly and now live in a blue-tarp hut under a Kyoto bridge. And, most haunting of all, there is the faded, starving beggar-girl, staring empty-eyed on the back steps of Bangkok's Central Railroad Station, whose only response to Vollmann's query is simply, I think I am rich.
The result of Vollmann's fearless journey is a look at poverty unlike any other. Complete with more than 100 powerfully affecting photographs taken of the interviewees by the author himself this series of vignettes and searing insights represents a tremendous step toward an understanding of this age-old social ill. With intense compassion and a scrupulously unpatronizing eye, Vollmann invites his readers to recognize in our fellow human beings their full dignity, fallibility, pride, and pain, and the power of their hard-fought resilience.
Review
"For all the sorrow Vollmann catalogs, his persistent and compassionate pursuit of the truth reminds us of all that we share as human beings and all that we can do for each other." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review
"Snapshots of people no one wants to think about, written with great candor by someone unafraid to reveal his own fears and prejudices." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"The best parts of Poor People, like a 1995 episode in the Philippines called 'The Rider,' are the self-contained ones: anecdotal, sharply observant, playful, unpretentious and frankly ambivalent about Mr. Vollmann's presence on the page." Janet Maslin, New York Times
Review
"As Vollmann struggles to make sense of their poverty, he writes with a reporter's frank detail and a novelist's grace....Vollmann obviously cares deeply about the problem of poverty; he offers a few solutions and asks some important questions. But in the end, you get the sense that the way he really thinks he can help poor people is by reminding us that they're alive." Ryan D'Agostino, Esquire (read the entire Esquire review)
Synopsis
A National Book Award-winning author travels the globe and meets with impoverished individuals where they live to document firsthand the causes and effects of poverty. Two 16-page photo inserts.
Synopsis
That was the simple yet groundbreaking question William T. Vollmann asked in cities and villages around the globe. The result of Vollmann's fearless inquiry is a view of poverty unlike any previously offered.
Poor People struggles to confront poverty in all its hopelessness and brutality, its pride and abject fear, its fierce misery and quiet resignation, allowing the poor to explain the causes and consequences of their impoverishment in their own cultural, social, and religious terms. With intense compassion and a scrupulously unpatronizing eye, Vollmann invites his readers to recognize in our fellow human beings their full dignity, fallibility, pride, and pain, and the power of their hard-fought resilience.
About the Author
William T. Vollmann is the author of seven novels, three collections of stories, and the seven-volume critique of violence, Rising Up and Rising Down. His most recent novel, Europe Central, won the National Book Award in 2005. He has also won the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction, a Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, and a Whiting Writers' Award. His journalism and fiction have been published in the New Yorker, Esquire, Spin, and Granta. Vollmann lives in Sacramento.