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Class Matters
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Manufacturer: Times Books
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.5130973
EAN: 9780805080551
ISBN: 0805080554
Label: Times Books
Manufacturer: Times Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: 2005-09-02
Publisher: Times Books
Release Date: 2005-08-25
Studio: Times Books
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Editorial Reviews:
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The acclaimed New York Times series on social class in America—and its implications for the way we live our lives
We Americans have long thought of ourselves as unburdened by class distinctions. We have no hereditary aristocracy or landed gentry, and even the poorest among us feel that they can become rich through education, hard work, or sheer gumption. And yet social class remains a powerful force in American life.
In Class Matters, a team of New York Times reporters explores the ways in which class—defined as a combination of income, education, wealth, and occupation—influences destiny in a society that likes to think of itself as a land of opportunity. We meet individuals in Kentucky and Chicago who have used education to lift themselves out of poverty and others in Virginia and Washington whose lack of education holds them back. We meet an upper-middle-class family in Georgia who moves to a different town every few years, and the newly rich in Nantucket whose mega-mansions have driven out the longstanding residents. And we see how class disparities manifest themselves at the doctor’s office and at the marriage altar.
For anyone concerned about the future of the American dream, Class Matters is truly essential reading.
“Class Matters is a beautifully reported, deeply disturbing, portrait of a society bent out of shape by harsh inequalities. Read it and see how you fit into the problem or—better yet—the solution!”
—Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Class Matters - and This Book Documents How
Comment: I read the articles from which the book comes. And they prove that your income, occupation, and personal financial resources have a major impact on the quality of your education, health care, housing and even your place of worship. It affects with whom you socialize. And this also has an impact on what class your child is likely to end up in when he or she graduates.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Very insightful
Comment: I really liked this book. It really gave me a new perspective on viewing class and wealth in a way that I hadn't thought of before. I wasn't aware that there was still such a distinction between "old money" and "new money". I really found the book easy to read with a lot of interesting information. I would recommend this book to everyone.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Why Doesn't Gender Matter?
Comment: "Class Matters" is an insightful examination of our seemingly "classless" society, indeed.
The authors do a thorough job of discussing how upbringing, education, race, and ethnicity can be determinants one's class standing as an adult. However, the authors fail to discuss a key element here: gender. Doesn't gender often determine class? Have the authors forgotten the age-old debate about men making more money than women in the U.S., and why this might be so?
Just reading the responses of some of the (male) interviewees is an eye-opener with regard to this wage disparity between genders. According to the interviewees, a key criterion for one having "made it" is that his wife doesn't need to work. However, the authors never pursued this fact as being worthy of any discussion. For example, what problems do these middle class (male) values pose for females who are either single or the financial head of the household and who are also the counterparts of these men at their workplaces? Might it present of clash of values in the workplace?
If these men who have "made it" don't like their women to be working outside of the home, how do their wives feel about staying at home, even though many of these wives are educated, some beyond the college level? We get a glimpse of one such wife in a chapter that highlights a family that falls into a particularly category: "transplant" (an upper-middle class family that moves around the country every few years to follow the ever-changing corporate career of, presumably, the head male of the family). The wives in these transplant families certainly not hold down paying jobs; instead, the spend their days shuffling their 2.5 children to and fro; searching for new properties and packing up their homes due to their husbands' new job transfer; feeding their families; and volunteering in their children's schools and/or in the community, etc. These wives are slaves to everyone's dreams but their own. What about their own educations? What type of subliminal message does this send to their children?
And, finally, and sadly, there is the story of the African American single mother of six who pulled herself up from below the poverty line and into the middle class because she became a nurse--but she couldn't have done it without the help of several men along the way. In fact, the only time that this woman could attend her nursing courses is when she had a man around to pay for some of her expenses. In the end, her nursing dream nearly became a distant memory until she married a man who "rescued" her by giving her financial security, and then her seventh child.
Perhaps this gender-class correlation had not gone unnoticed by these authors, but instead was simply too much of a painful, hopeless reality to face, and that's why they chose to keep it out of the book. But for me, a well-educated, single working woman, the message is obvious: American women, if you are not independently wealthy, then get yourself an educated man who will be your savior and secure your place in the middle classes because there is very little chance for you to do that on your own.
Customer Rating:
Summary: We are not a classless society
Comment: I read two of the articles in this book when they originally came out in the NY Times and I'm glad they are out in a book form so that they can be read by everyone. The sociologist James Loewen in his book, Lies My Teacher Taught Me, said that the way history is taught in American high schools makes us "stupider" about social class because the subject is entirely avoided. Many Americans think we live in a classless society, one big, happy middle class, though the contrary is true (look how suburban subdivisions are divided by house prices, even on signs: the 300-399K development, the 499 and up, the 899K and up, the 100-159 "starter homes", and so on). A strength of this book for the general reading public is that it approaches class divisions in a number of different ways (healthcare, education, etc) by examining the lives of real people. This is a sociology text that uses concrete instances to elucidate general themes.
When I attended Haverford College in the late 1970s and early 1980s after having grown up in a poor, working class neighborhood, I was struck by encountering people who were far more urbane, well-traveled, well-spoken, and well-dressed than I was. It was intimidating, but I learned to be a member of this world (I chuckle now at how kids made fun of my "accent" and corrected my grammar while I was speaking to them) and for the rest of my life I've been going between worlds, conscious of how I speak and act in each (I've "escaped" the social class I grew up in). Because of these experiences this book really resonates with me and I'm sure it will resonate with people who have had similar experiences. For everyone else, it is a welcome introduction to what we Americans are "stupid" about: social stratification in American society and how it determines our behavior, our opportunities, and our health.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Show me the money.
Comment: Heavy on the anecdotal but not on the philosophical, that is, where are we heading with the gross concentration of wealth in a few hands?
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