Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain's Underclass

Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain's Underclass
ISBN-10
1951627288
ISBN-13
9781951627287
Category
Political Science
Pages
240
Language
English
Published
2020-09-15
Publisher
Simon and Schuster
Author
Darren McGarvey

Description

The international bestseller and Orwell Prize winner: “One of the best accounts of working-class life I have read.” —The Guardian Many observers—especially those who’ve never experienced poverty—struggle to understand such phenomena as Brexit and Donald Trump, or the connection between poverty and the rise of tribalism in the UK, in the US, and around the world. Darren McGarvey has experienced poverty and its devastations firsthand. He grew up in a community where violence was a form of currency and has lived through addiction, abuse, and homelessness. He knows why people from deprived communities feel angry and unheard. And he wants to explain. So he invites you on a safari of sorts—but not the kind where the wildlife is surveyed from a safe distance. His visceral and cogently argued book—part memoir, part polemic—takes us inside the experience of extreme poverty to show how the pressures really feel and how hard their legacy is to overcome. Arguing that both the left and right misunderstand poverty as it is actually lived, McGarvey sets forth what everybody—including himself—could do to change things. Razor-sharp, fearless, and brutally honest, Poverty Safari offers unforgettable insight into conditions in modern Britain—and into issues of inequality, tribalism, cultural anxiety, identity politics, the poverty industry, and the resentment, anger, and feelings of exclusion and being left behind that have fueled right-wing populism and the rise of ethno-nationalism. “[McGarvey offers] what he calls an ‘emotional reality’ about deprivation that is rarely captured by statistics.” —The New York Times “Solid, original reporting on class inequality.” —Kirkus Reviews “Poverty Safari challenges the left as well as the right.” —The Irish Times “A painfully honest autobiographical study [and] a bracing contribution to the debate about how to fix our broken politics.” —Financial Times

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