100 Books Like The Undeserving Poor

I am an anthropologist and studied homelessness in Paris and London for the last decade. I was drawn into the world of people on the streets when I moved to London and started observing their parallel world. I spent almost a year with people on the street in London and two years in Paris. I volunteered in day centers, safe injection facilities, and soup kitchens and slept in a homeless shelter. Since I finished my first book on my observations in Paris, I have advised both policymakers on homelessness and written countless journalistic articles. My goal is always to provide a clearer picture of homelessness through the eyes of the people themselves. 

I’ve been studying China for almost 60 years and have visited the country 40 times. Around 1990 I became aware of the sad situation of migrants from the countryside trying to move to cities to earn a better living. There they are met with low wages, poor living conditions, and discrimination. I spent 6 or 7 years interviewing them and writing about them and the book I wrote won a prize for the best book on 20th century China published in 1999. Then I learned about the workers who were laid off as China modernized, and went to talk with them. The present book is full of empathy and concern for these people.

I’ve been studying China for almost 60 years and have visited the country 40 times. Around 1990 I became aware of the sad situation of migrants from the countryside trying to move to cities to earn a better living. There they are met with low wages, poor living conditions, and discrimination. I spent 6 or 7 years interviewing them and writing about them and the book I wrote won a prize for the best book on 20th century China published in 1999. Then I learned about the workers who were laid off as China modernized, and went to talk with them. The present book is full of empathy and concern for these people.

I’ve been studying China for almost 60 years and have visited the country 40 times. Around 1990 I became aware of the sad situation of migrants from the countryside trying to move to cities to earn a better living. There they are met with low wages, poor living conditions, and discrimination. I spent 6 or 7 years interviewing them and writing about them and the book I wrote won a prize for the best book on 20th century China published in 1999. Then I learned about the workers who were laid off as China modernized, and went to talk with them. The present book is full of empathy and concern for these people.

I have spent my professional career attempting to reform the justice system and create safer communities. For nearly two decades, I served as the executive director of the Center for Court Innovation (now the Center for Justice Innovation). Now, I co-edit a policy journal called Vital City that attempts to spark new thinking about how to achieve public safety. Over the years, I have worked with numerous city, state, and federal officials. I have seen that most of the people working within government are trying their best in difficult circumstances. I have also seen that it is enormously difficult to change government systems and solve complicated social problems.

I have worked on the problems of poverty, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, for much of my professional life. I worked at the Centre for the Study of African Economies, which is part of the Department of Economics at Oxford University, from 1991 until my retirement in 2012. I continue to work both with the Centre and the Department as a Managing Editor of Oxford Economic Papers and Chief Editor of the Journal of African Economies. My recent book The Poor and the Plutocrats grew out of this background where I wanted to understand the links between very poor countries and those of much richer ones.

The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth is the second volume of my nationalism trilogy. When I published the first volume, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, the accepted view on the subject of nationalism was that it is a product of economic development, specifically, of industrialization and capitalism. On the basis of historical evidence, I proved that its emergence had nothing to do with these economic phenomena: in fact, it preceded both. Reviews of Nationalism, noting that, for this reason, economic developments could not have caused nationalism, raised the question what relationship, then, did exist between nationalism and the economy, and this led me to investigate it. 

Since I was a student, I have been fascinated with social and economic inequality–the more so because back then, my professors seemed to disregard this subject of study. So, I made it one of my own main areas of research: I simply needed to understand more about the nature and the causes of inequality in human societies. In recent years, I have been busy researching economic inequality in different historical settings, also looking at specific socioeconomic strata. I began with the poor, and more recently, I focused on the rich. In my list of recommendations, I included books that, I believe, are particularly insightful concerning wealth and the wealthy.

I’m deeply concerned about the health of the planet and am puzzled by our failure to act. As someone who thinks a lot about museums and heritage (aka the stories we tell about ourselves), I’m intrigued by how we think about places of environmental harm as heritage and how we pay attention to the environmental impact of heritage sites like WWI battlefields, English ironworks, and Appalachian coal mines. Interrogating what we remember and what we forget illuminates the systems of power that benefit from ignoring environmental and social costs. My hope is that understanding the history of toxic harm points us to a more sustainable, just future.

I’ve become fascinated with the unconventional tumultuous world of the 1920s ever since I discovered my grandmother’s box of mementos that led to my debut historical fiction, Whistling Women and Crowing Hens. The lesser-known parts of our country’s history draw me in, and the potential for strong female characters keeps me writing. Before I fell down many research rabbit holes, I thought the 1920s were just speakeasies, fringed flappers, and bathtub gin—while entertaining, it’s only the “big city” side of this transformative decade. I’ve found I prefer reading what everyday townspeople experienced, or how “normal” women became unexpected heroes, or ways people persevered after the turmoil WWI caused. There are so many undiscovered stories to be told!