Discover new selections
Kindle Unlimited
Unlimited reading. Over 4 million titles. Learn more
Read for Free
OR
$9.99 with 50 percent savings
Digital List Price: $19.99

Promotions apply when you purchase

These promotions will be applied to this item:

Some promotions may be combined; others are not eligible to be combined with other offers. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions.

Sold by Amazon.com Services LLC.
Read with our free app
You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.
Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Follow the author

William T. Vollmann
Follow
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

Poor People Kindle Edition

by William T. Vollmann (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.1 out of 5 stars 121 ratings

That was the simple yet groundbreaking question William T. Vollmann asked in cities and villages around the globe. The result of Vollmann's fearless inquiry is a view of poverty unlike any previously offered.

Poor People struggles to confront poverty in all its hopelessness and brutality, its pride and abject fear, its fierce misery and quiet resignation, allowing the poor to explain the causes and consequences of their impoverishment in their own cultural, social, and religious terms. With intense compassion and a scrupulously unpatronizing eye, Vollmann invites his readers to recognize in our fellow human beings their full dignity, fallibility, pride, and pain, and the power of their hard-fought resilience.

Some images that appeared in the print edition of this book are unavailable in the electronic edition due to rights reasons.

Previous slide of product details
  1. Print length
    466 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    HarperCollins e-books
  4. Publication date
    October 5, 2010
  5. File size
    2.5 MB
  6. Page Flip
    Enabled
  7. Word Wise
    Enabled
  8. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
Next slide of product details

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The varied responses to the question "why are you poor?" fuels this meditation on the nature of poverty by journalist and National Book Award–winning novelist Vollmann (Europe Central, etc.). The book, structured as a series of vignettes that span the globe and decades, describes Vollmann's encounters with individuals and families who many would consider poor. A handful of these people, including three generations of women in Thailand and two men in Japan, drive the book, as Vollmann closely examines their circumstances. His alternately sentimental and erudite inquiry is based in large part on his and their personal experience, as an antidote to the official and scientific data about poverty. Indeed, his attempt to understand poverty is deeply entwined with a more poetic inquiry into happiness. Some of the anecdotes set aflight by Vollmann's novelistic attention to details are provocative;others, however, come off as more nostalgic than illustrative, and give the book a desultory feel. But the book's movement between details and thought, spiced with Vollmann's singular style, is intriguing. On the table is not just poverty, but questions of community, fate and perspective. The book's greatest accomplishment is that—unlike other works of this sort—it's neither guilt producing nor guilt absolving. At the end, there's no implied sigh or self-congratulation, for writer or reader. This is the book's greatest achievement.(Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

William T. Vollmann is an erudite, complex writer. Most recently, he explored 20th-century authoritarianism in the National Book Award?winning Europe Central (***1/2 July/Aug 2005). Poor People raised inevitable comparisons to James Agee's and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), about sharecroppers during the Depression. Yet Vollmann neither sentimentalizes nor romanticizes poverty. While some reviewers described Poor People as eye-opening and visionary, others criticized it as a mere loosely structured travelogue. Some essays exhibit clear coaching of Vollman's subjects, contradictions (is poverty political, or not?), and a lack of objectivity. Despite the book's unevenness, reviewers uniformly praised "The Rider," a piece set in the Philippines. If you're familiar with Vollmann's previous work and style, his ruminations on his own ambiguous understanding of poverty are worth reading.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B003V1WW9W
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperCollins e-books (October 5, 2010)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 5, 2010
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 2.5 MB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 466 pages
  • Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0060878843
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 out of 5 stars 121 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
William T. Vollmann

William T. Vollmann

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

William Tanner Vollmann (born July 28, 1959) is an American novelist, journalist, war correspondent, short story writer, and essayist. He won the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction for the novel Europe Central. He lives in Sacramento, California, with his wife and daughter.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Øystein Vidnes (http://www.flickr.com/photos/oysteinv/160077312/) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
121 global ratings

Review this product

Share your thoughts with other customers
Write a customer review

Customers say

Customers find the book worth reading and appreciate its insightful content, with one review describing it as a well-organized study of poverty. The writing quality receives mixed reactions, with some customers finding it fascinating while others describe it as unreadable.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Select to learn more

8 customers mention "Value for money"8 positive0 negative

Customers find the book worth reading, with one describing it as very stimulating.

"...Very worth reading." Read more

"Great book! Shines light on a subject we all need to address." Read more

"...I found the book very stimulating and interesting perspective of how someone else sees poor people." Read more

"Big fan of Vollmann, so yes five stars - worth reading" Read more

5 customers mention "Insight"5 positive0 negative

Customers find the book insightful, with one customer describing it as an epic journey into how poor people experience life, while another notes its well-organized structure and compassionate approach.

"An epic journey into how poor people, meaning, people who perceive themselves as poor, see themselves and their world...." Read more

"...he does sometimes go off on tangents, I find his stream of consciousness quite interesting at many points...." Read more

"Great book! Shines light on a subject we all need to address." Read more

"...His methodology is compassionate and as unbiased as a concerned human being can be...." Read more

3 customers mention "Writing quality"0 positive3 negative

Customers criticize the writing style of the book, describing it as terrible and rambling, with one customer noting it is written for other intellectuals.

"...and footnotes, difficult-to-follow sentence structures, and arcane vocabulary...." Read more

"I found this book unreadable...pompous, condenscending, rambling and ultimately not relevant to what I perceive as reality...maybe it's me, maybe it..." Read more

"It is so inherently obvious that the writer is an egotistical ass with a terrible sense of writing. A 3 year old could write better." Read more

Top reviews from the United States

  • J. F. Stafura
    5.0 out of 5 stars Another amazing book
    Reviewed in the United States on May 7, 2007
    Verified Purchase
    There are a lot of people that don't like to read Vollman, insisting that his focus on the seedier sides of life color his observations in a way that makes them unaccessible to average readers. His tendency to write long books keeps another group on the bench.

    For those that are willing to work a little and not expect to be entertained Vollman is something completely different, we see him as this generations Joyce, Dickens or Melville.

    Poor People shines a harsh light on another area that makes regular folks uncomfortable, and let's the people tell their story. Not in straight prose as we wish they could, but in the mutterings and actions that is all that their deprived lives provided them to work with, depriving the critics in tunr of the plots and meanings that are usually spelled out for them by the mainstream authors.

    Once again as in Whores for Gloria, Rising Up and Rising Down, Europe Central and Royal Family that preceded Poor People, I find myself thinking of the nuances and implications of this book and the hard answers that Vollman refused to supply like another Chopra or Thomas L. Friedman sermon on how we should feel and what a great future we have if we don't look into the rough spots that aren't so clean and orderly.

    Vollman's writing is like a bad accident in some ways, you feel guilty if you look and as if your missing something if you don't. In this case you are missing something if you don't look, one of the most important writers and thinkers of our times.
    52 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report
  • Easy and Mert
    5.0 out of 5 stars A Deep Exploration of What it Means to be Poor and Not to Be
    Reviewed in the United States on April 12, 2019
    Verified Purchase
    An epic journey into how poor people, meaning, people who perceive themselves as poor, see themselves and their world. It spans continents and cultures, but ends in the homeless encampment in the parking lot of the author's apartment. People whose voices are seldom heard in books. These accounts get pretty raw, and can be hard to read about these things.

    This is not your standard oral history. Much of the book is devoted to Vollman wrestling with what it means to be poor and what it means for him not to be poor. His ruminations are insightful and radically humanist.

    Very worth reading.
    4 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report
  • Jennie
    4.0 out of 5 stars I understand the criticisms, but I like it.
    Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2012
    Verified Purchase
    I am almost finished reading this book. Personally, while I do understand some of the reviewers' criticisms of it, I am enjoying it. One problem some people seem to have is that he does not offer solutions or even opinions in many cases, and that he has this outsider's perspective and then on top of that is paying people, so in turn he is getting what he wants in a way. And while I understand those criticisms, I am OK with all of it because he is exceedingly conscious of those very facts, and acknowledges them constantly. The book is not intended to offer solutions for poverty, and it is not a judgment of the people he interviews nor of those of us who are not poor (i.e., most of the readers). It is just an examination with plenty of introspection, and I find it quite fascinating. I enjoy his writing style and while yes, he does sometimes go off on tangents, I find his stream of consciousness quite interesting at many points. I think he accomplishes what he sets out to do, and I appreciate the narrative's honesty.
    15 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report
  • Tae from Hawaii
    5.0 out of 5 stars Perspective Broadening
    Reviewed in the United States on September 5, 2013
    Verified Purchase
    This work is timeless although it's really a snapshot in time of the author's. I could recommend it to 'straights' or other clueless middle class peeps like myself. I think it could be useful for social workers, psychologists, parole officers, 'screws', 'hacks', police, federal investigators, psychiatric nurses, psychiatrists and anyone else who deals with poor people for a living.
    2 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report
  • andrew brethauer
    3.0 out of 5 stars Three Stars
    Reviewed in the United States on January 4, 2017
    Verified Purchase
    Too much of the same story.
    Helpful
     Report
  • Mark P.
    2.0 out of 5 stars Written by an intellectual for other intellectuals
    Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2023
    Verified Purchase
    This book is written by an intellectual for other intellectuals. It includes what-if scenarios, multiple qualifications and footnotes, difficult-to-follow sentence structures, and arcane vocabulary. If you are writing your dissertation on this topic then this book is for you. If you are a pleasure reader trying to learn more about this topic then this book is not for you.
    One person found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report
  • christopher Anderson
    5.0 out of 5 stars Thumbs up bruh!!
    Reviewed in the United States on March 5, 2021
    Verified Purchase
    Great book! Shines light on a subject we all need to address.
    Helpful
     Report
  • Pr. Clifton J McMillan, Sr
    5.0 out of 5 stars A painful book to read
    Reviewed in the United States on September 14, 2017
    Verified Purchase
    A painful book to read, yet vollmann humanized those who are suffering from extreme poverty. His methodology is compassionate and as unbiased as a concerned human being can be.
    Heart wrenching, informative, a challenge to seek solutions.
    One person found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English
  • E.T.
    5.0 out of 5 stars Very good book. Puts things in perspective and makes us ...
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 15, 2015
    Verified Purchase
    Very good book. Puts things in perspective and makes us realise how ungrateful we can be and how many things we take for granted!
    Report
  • Francisco Ruiz
    5.0 out of 5 stars Explica un pobre.
    Reviewed in Spain on September 6, 2019
    Verified Purchase
    Título imprescindible para que sintamos lo desgarrador de la pobreza en testimonios de primera mano.
    Report
  • Nitin
    5.0 out of 5 stars Do I see Poor People?
    Reviewed in India on August 7, 2018
    Verified Purchase
    Beautifully written and a compulsory reading on people living on a one-cent dream.
    Report

Report an issue


Does this item contain inappropriate content?
Report
Do you believe that this item violates a copyright?
Report
Does this item contain quality or formatting issues?
Report