David Shipler's The Working Poor: Invisible In America

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THE phrase ''working poor'' doesn't carry much weight in this fractious political season. It slips by in a campaign speech, with nothing much to grab onto as it passes. It suffers from a kind of blunt-edged simplicity -- a collision of enormous, rounded terms that, by the lights of American exceptionalism, should not be joined. Both political parties quietly agree that it is an ugly, unsettling combination -- that any American who works steadily should not have to suffer the barbed indignities of poverty. But Americans do -- millions of them. There are 35 million people in the country living in poverty. Most of the adults in that group work nowadays; many of them work full time. And while there are heavy concentrations of African-Americans and white single women in the mix, the group is every bit as diverse, and diffuse, as the nation is. …show more content…

Shipler knows this and, somehow, proceeds undaunted. A former New York Times reporter, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his book ''Arab and Jew,'' and then managed to wrap his arms around the classically obstreperous topic of race in America with ''A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America.'' This is what he's become known for: tackling the

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