May 26, 2012 · www.gothamgazette.com

Gotham Gazette
Loading
Social Services
Newsletter
Sign up for our monthly Social Services newsletter:

First Name:

Last Name:

Email:


Plain-text HTML


Best Books About Social Services

Sort books by: Author | Title | Publisher | Year

Down And Out In New York City: Homelessness: A Dishonorable Poverty
by Tony D. Guzewicz (Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 1994.)

A series of vignettes of homeless people from the streets of New York. Photographs of each person accompany the stories. The author allows his subjects to speak through him. more info...

Hands To Work: The Stories Of Three Families Racing The Welfare Clock
by LynNell Hancock, William Morrow (HarperCollins, 2002.)

This books tells how three women and their families coped with three years of changes in the New York City welfare system. Hands to Work shows that there is no typical welfare recipient. The author suggests that the changes in welfare rules made it harder for the women to move to the world of work. more info...

How The Other Half Lives: Studies Among The Tenements Of New York
by Jacob A. Riis (Hill & Wang, 1890.)

These are 2 links to full-length, on-line versions of Riis' classic expose of poverty in New York City at the turn of the century. His photographs and dramatic descriptions helped reformers make the case for housing improvements, better health care, and other changes that benefitted the most wretched New Yorkers. Riis' blatant ethnic stereotyping would discredit him today, but remains valuable as an illustration of how the arbitrary images of prejudice have changed since his time. (http://www.bartleby.com/208/ , http://www.yale.edu/amstud/inforev/riis/about.html) more info...

No Shame In My Game: The Working Poor In The Inner City
by Katherine S. Newman (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and the Russell Sage Foundation, 1999.)

Newman spent a year observing two hundred employees at four fast food restaurants in Harlem. She also followed one hundred people through unsuccessful job searches. Her research included in-depth interviews, special diaries, visits around the neighborhood, and first-hand experience of working in the fast food world. She discovered that her subjects were proud of their jobs and their ability to work hard, and that success at a restaurant job could give young people the motivation to continue their education. Along the way, she shows that this particular "dead-end job" requires a many informal skills, due to its fast pace and frequent hitches in the assembly-line process. Newman also documents the strength of the workers' families, and the frustration of those who could not find work. more info...

 

The Mole People : Life In The Tunnels Beneath New York City
by Jennifer Toth (Chicago Review Press, 1995.)

Toth describes the underground community that lived, during the 1990's, in the maze carrying gas and sewer lines and abandoned subway tunnels and stations. She documented the lives of people of all ages living in communities of up to 200 people, some of whom stayed underground for weeks at a time. Toth puts this world into the context of other historical and fictional underground communities, from Egyptian slaves living in mines to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. The story she tells fascinates even while the reader is appalled. more info...

Reader Submissions / Others.

• Sidewalk by Mitchell Duneier. a tremendous book. duneier is arguing that the broken windows policy is inhumane. by getting to know the greenwich village booksellers he determines that the elder booksellers serve as an important model for others who make their lives on the street, serving a role society is not completely fulfilling. in fulfilling this role they become much different than the graffitti covered wall or the abandoned car and deserved to be treated as such.

Interested in other books about NYC? Visit our NYC Books section.

[Suggest a Social Services book]