The Other American The Life Of Michael Harrington

"Most Americans first heard of Michael Harrington with the publication of The Other America, his seminal book on American poverty. Isserman expertly tracks Harrington's beginnings in the Catholic Worke"

Examines the economic underworld of migrant farm workers, the aged, minority groups, and other economically underprivileged groups.

The author of the college course book "America Divided" now offers an epic biography of Michael Harrington, "the man who discovered poverty" and inspired a generation.

Selected as A Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review Fifty years after Michael Harrington published his groundbreaking book The Other America, in which he chronicled the lives of people excluded from the Age of Affluence, poverty in America is back with a vengeance. It is made up of both the long-term chronically poor and new working poor—the tens of millions of victims of a broken economy and an ever more dysfunctional political system. In many ways, for the majority of Americans, financial insecurity has become the new norm. The American Way of Poverty shines a light on this travesty. Sasha Abramsky brings the effects of economic inequality out of the shadows and, ultimately, suggests ways for moving toward a fairer and more equitable social contract. Exploring everything from housing policy to wage protections and affordable higher education, Abramsky lays out a panoramic blueprint for a reinvigorated political process that, in turn, will pave the way for a renewed War on Poverty. It is, Harrington believed, a moral outrage that in a country as wealthy as America, so many people could be so poor. Written in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, in an era of grotesque economic extremes, The American Way of Poverty brings that same powerful indignation to the topic.

In this provocative biographical portrait, Robert A. Gorman examines the political and intellectual life of this engaging radical thinker while looking ahead to the ways in which the work and example he has left us can affect political life in the twenty-first century. Michael Harrington's major attempt to Americanize socialism plays a big part in Gorman's analysis. He tells readers how it is possible to be both radical andpatriotic and how an unjust system can be transformed without being destroyed.