'the Other America' Takes The Veil Off American Poverty

By Scott Martelle, Special to the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times: Books
Sun, 05/27/2012 - 12:00am

Fifty years on, Michael Harrington's book resonates in its impassioned look at one of the country's 'greatest scandals.'Michael Harrington's "The Other America: Poverty in the United States" had been in print for about 20 years when I first read it in the early 1980s. I was a young journalist then, and I had found a musty paperback edition in a basement-level used bookstore around the corner from my apartment near the heart of Jamestown, N.Y., where my entry-level newspaper wages were so low that, after rent and student loan payments, I couldn't afford a car.

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