House-poor

A wonderful book for discovering the true meaning of Christian love in our often difficult and painful world. I have used this book more than once in putting together mini retreats for adults. One cannot help soul searching after the experience. Viewing the film Romero with Raul Julia helps bring it all home. Don't let the title put you off - the book is all about love without violence.

Archbishop Romero, the asassinated bishop of El Salvador (1980) is considered by me and many to be a prophet to the church and world of our time. Faced with a situation in his country that saw 5 percent of his nation with 95 percent of the wealth and total power over the government and military which they used to oppress the 95 percent in poverty, Archbishop Romero was transformed from a conservative bookworm to the greatest orator for justice in the clergy since Martin Luther King, Jr. This book contains excerpts from his sermons arragned in chronological order during the three years of his episcopacy in San Salvador (1977-1980). These sermons were more than just spiritual messages, but rather nation-wide calls for social justice, for nonviolence, and for an end to poverty and pain. Drawing on readings from the bible, Romero the scholar and orator shine through, but so does the Romero of compassion and solidarity with the people who suffered so much. And in many ways what he said then is still applicable today, not only in El Salvador, but all over the world, wherever there is injustice and oppression. A must read for any person concerned for social justice for all grounded in a Christian perspective!

Romero's moving quotations, spoken from the altar, are presented in chronological order. Each day Romero spoke increasingly explicit "truth to power". As his message becomes more threatening to the powers that be, the reader can almost watch the gun sites come into focus on the heart of this martyr!

Though not as heart-rending as "How the Other Half Lives", this book by Riis is important to shed light on how society cleaned up some of the worst slums in US history.

Tammany Hall, the Democratic party machine, was responsible for political patronage jobs that were do-nothing plums; a photo shows the street-cleaning of Tammany broomsmen versus that of a reformer who took over cleaning the precinct's streets. Various charitable societies worked strenuously to ameliorate the worst of the slums, to pass laws requiring light and air in tenements, though landlords were clever in circumventing or perverting the legal requirements (a window in a room could be on an inside wall; the airshaft--a thin passageway between buildings was all the air many apartments got.) Schools were at first overcrowded rooms with no desks, no ventilation and seventy students attempting to learn. Reformers got desks, ventilated buildings, smaller class sizes. This is a fascinating story of how people worked together to try to better an abusive situation in the poorest sections of American cities.

This book hilights the lows of urban life around the turn of the century, a time when immigration and migration were happening all around. City life in america had a huge underside with noise, crime, poverty, and squalor. Racial and ethnic conflicts were previlant. Riis' photos capture this side of city life in America.

"The first tenement New York knew bore the mark of Cain from its birth, though a generation passed before the writing was deciphered."

"How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York" is arguably one of the most important books published in the United States in the 19th-century ("Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" are the obvious other contenders for the title). Together with its sequel "Battle with the Slum," this book uses sensationalist photographs and prose (as the above opening line indicates) from Jacob Riis to document the appalling living conditions in the Lower East Side of New York City at the turn-of-the-century. The chilling photographs of the filth and squalor of these tenements are unforgettable and while the prose does get a bit lurid at times, this famous journalistic record exposing the poverty and degradation of the New York slums is also a sociology treatise wherein Riis explores the evolution of the tenement. Within this context, the birth of the airshaft takes on profound significance as Riis tries to establish some of the causes for the effects he has documented as the premier social reformer in American history.

The idea that this book is too dated to have an impact today is, to say the least, a curious position. In its day "How the Other Half Lives" was a rhetorical document, constructed by Riis to advance an irrefutable position that something needed to be down about these conditions. Riis was a major social reformer and his book is of historic importance. Even more than a century removed from its publication it is still a powerful work. If he were walking the streets of New York City today no doubt Riis would be photographing and telling of the plight of the homeless and the "modern" projects that have replaced the tenements of his own time. At the very least, it gives readers a clear sense of what poverty and degradation was like at the previous turn of the century.

Like books by Steinbeck, How the other half lives is a eye opening expose of life for the have-nots in the late 19th century. The progression through the different areas of NYC shows that there were a lot more poorer people in the city than I thought. Riis is thorough and pulls no punches in showing how the other half true lives.

How did our grandfathers and great-grandfathers (and great-great, I suppose) survive immigration and the slums? What was life like on the Lower East Side of New York? For those of us whose family has only been in the US for a few generations, this is a must-read. Whether Irish, Italian, Jewish, Chinese or Polish, German, Russian, hordes of refugees ended up in New York on the promise of a better life.

Reading Riis' book reads like the newspaper in some ways; entrepreneurs lured poor people from Eastern Europe and contracted out their labor in sweat shops in the US. Sound familiar? But what is not so familiar are the living conditions in the tenements, dark, unventilated cages in blocks of buildings that rented for a surprising high rent to people who died by the thousands in the unsanitary conditions. Farm animals had it better. Why was rent so high? Supply and demand. Cheaper rent was to be had in Brooklyn and the outlying (as yet unincorporated) boroughs, but the WORK was in Manhattan, where you could get by as a tailor, a seamstress, a peddler or in some illegitimate activity.

The conditions will make you cry; the story of foundling babies (abandoned newborns) is astonishing. A cradle was put outside a Catholic Church and instead of a baby each night, racks of babies appeared. The Church had to establish foundling hospitals run by nuns, who persuaded the unwed or impoverished mothers to nurse the baby they gave up, plus another baby (women can usually nurse two, though these malnourished women must have been hard-pressed.) The child mortality rate, especially in the "back tenements" or buildings built on to the back of others (dark and airless) was incredible.

I wish the plates in the book were of better quality; Riis took many photographs, but the reproduction here is poor and they are hard to see. I recommend that if you are interested in this subject from seeing "The Gangs of New York" or for genealogical reasons, that you visit the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and see the buildings for yourself. Even cleaned up and no longer packed with unwashed people, they are heart-rending.

This book delves into the life of Lillian D. Wald and her accomplishments. From her involvement in the Henry Street Movement to her stance toward the Federal Children's Bureau, Wald exemplifies the progressive social reform movement. Further, her lead in the push for full-time nursing staff in public schools and progress with the Red Cross to wipe out the influenza epidemic represent the power of this influential leading woman in U.S. history.

$8.00 for less than 50 pages. And what is contained in those pages amounts to not much more than a review of prices for certain companies' safes, some idea of how effective or not they are, and ... not much else. Oh, and the great way to save money on safes is to buy one used. No really earth-shattering secrets are contained here, unfortunately.