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This book is boring. It seems to be written for the naive Americans that believe class doesn't matter - but will they really even think of picking this book up? I find the stories tedious. They lose their power when filtered through a reporter and not told firsthand. There are so many better ways to understand the lives of people who are in different classes from you. Mostly, go out and meet them.I was hoping there would be a "so what" to this book. Yes, class really does matter. But simply poin...
This book was my first in a recent exploration of class differences. It was interesting, but since it was originally written by NYTimes reporters for a series of newspaper articles, it wasn’t as meaty as I was hoping for. The stats and research results were few. Instead the reporters did the research, but substituted interviews and stories with people whom they saw as representative of the trends. Fine for reporting, not as fine for social science.Main points:One way to think of a person’s posit...
The kind of articles that really make you think. It's hard to pinpoint what class really means, and how it changes due to where you live and over time. There's a great chapter in here about a lawyer from Kentucky and how she doesn't feel like she fits into either the class she was born into or the class she's in now, and there's another great one about the new super wealthy on Nantucket. It almost makes you sympathize with the old money people, crazy as that seems. Oh, and there's another great
Class MattersJust like George Orwell, I am from the upper lower middle class. This book is a reprint of a series of New York Times articles about class in America. These articles were published during May-June 2005, so they don’t have the trauma of the 2008 Don’t-Call-It-A-Depression-Please running through it.(One choice pre-2008 quote: "Banks, more confident about measuring risk, now extend credit to low-income families, so that owning a home...is no longer evidence that someone is middle class...
NYT page turning journalism luminates class difference in the US, but honestly, its themes could have been summed in a few charts. Insights gained:Class mobility is low; immigrants have it worst. Accumulated wealth and close-knit community leadership makes this wave of immigrants slower to move into the middle class than in previous centuries (within 3 genera). Class distinction is blurred by 1. democratization of tech, 2. marketing of subluxury goods. i.e. international budget travel - Bali, cr...
"If Gatsby were to come back today, he would come back as Donald Trump and would want a date not with Daisy but with Britney" (200). So, parts of this book are now dated (no pun intended), but overall, the information in this book is excellent and fascinating.
While reading the book "Class Matters" by the New York Times, I was really able to understand a new sense of the different levels of classism that I previously couldn't fully comprehend. Throughout the book, different classes are given detail into what life is like within those certain social classes. The book first brought up the "Super Rich" Upper Class which was shown off by having 45 foot yachts and their own island off the coast of cape cod, Massachusetts. This made me realize how luxurious...
This book contains one of the most well-written and clearest essays I have ever read, maybe in general but certainly depicting issues of class. The article in question is about 3 people, of 3 classes, who each have a heart attack and the various factors that contribute to the success (or lack thereof) of the care they receive during and after. It really pinpoints some major, often-ignored issues of class, without demonizing any one group. For example, it's clear that all 3 have doctors who care
Although it is now several years out of date, the patterns described in this book still hold true and the human faces it puts on people of all classes remain an engaging reminder of how much people have in common, no matter where they fall on the class scale. It's not always pleasant reading--the inequities described make even this lower-middle-class reader uncomfortably aware of her privileges--and the statistical chapters can be dry even as they are informative--but the education is worth the
Found this is a "little free library" and read it with interest; being pre-Great Recession, it offered some seemingly outdated interpretations for the current "equity climate." What was missing in the book for me was any discussion of just how much the cost of living has soared, esp. in certain American cities where immigrants congregate, which of course directly affects their ability to get ahead. Also lacking was how certain values- whether transmitted across classes or held within- play a rol...
Parsing class in America was always going to be tough, and presenting thorny class issues from a newspaper’s supposedly neutral standpoint must be even tougher, but even bearing that in mind, this book falls short. This may be because the material hasn’t aged very well, or because when you’re talking about what class looks like in America without much discussion (or fingerpointing) of how it came to be that way, you’re only delivering half a story. Presenting class as a neutral force, which rand...
This book is depressing and distressing but some parts are quite enlighting and deserve special attention. One of the messages in this book is that class is not just about money or power. It is more of a set of untangible resources that mostly come from within the family. And this is why giving away money and scholarships to low income students just doesn't work and statistics show that these students quite often drop out from college in a early stage of their education. Teaching values, setting...