1990 - 144 pages - The Boostrap Press - $ 12.50
Author: Vincent Fanelli
This is the history of the first fifteen years of the Fourth World Movement’s involvement with the poorest families in New York City. This book provides an intensely human picture of chronic poverty in late twentieth century urban America. Through the eyes of volunteers who lived and worked in one New York neighborhood for a decade and a half, it makes us come understand the poor people, not as statistical abstractions or faceless objects of pity or contempt.
“Each chapter in this present chronicle is replete with evidence of the violation of [human] rights […]. In publishing this book under its imprint, […] the Intermediate Technology Development group of North America seeks to contribute to the growing recognition that the basic rights of those that live in chronic poverty are being violated and to the ongoing struggle to remedy those violations through constructive action based on human understanding”.
- Excerpt from the foreword by Ward Morehouse
Chairman, Intermediate Technology Development Group/North America
“The Human Face of Poverty bypasses the statistics […]to present a picture of the day-to-day life of low-income families, and particularly their children, on New York’s East Low Side…”
- Former Representative Bill Green
New York, 15th District
“Vincent Fanelli’s book […] raises questions that cannot easily be dismissed about the effectiveness of our more usual approaches to helping those caught in poverty”.
- Daniel Kronenfeld
Executive Director, Henry Street Settlement.
“Fanelli’s vived personal account […] provides a warm human vision for social change and empowerment that America desperately needs to listen to and act upon.”
-Philippe Bourgois
San Francisco State University anthropologist and author of a study of East Harlem
“The volunteers in this book […] believe poor people want a way out of their misery, but that must be their way.”
- Bertram M. Beck
Associate Dean of Social Service, Fordham University.