Losing Our Way
An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
From longtime New York Times columnist Bob Herbert comes a wrenching portrayal of ordinary Americans struggling for survival in a nation that has lost its way
In his eighteen years as an opinion columnist for The New York Times, Herbert championed the working poor and the middle class. After filing his last column in 2011, he set off on a journey across the country to report on Americans who were being left behind in an economy that has never fully recovered from the Great Recession. The portraits of those he encountered fuel his new book, Losing Our Way. Herbert’s combination of heartrending reporting and keen political analysis is the purest expression since the Occupy movement of the plight of the 99 percent.
The individuals and families who are paying the price of America’s bad choices in recent decades form the book’s emotional center: an exhausted high school student in Brooklyn who works the overnight shift in a factory at minimum wage to help pay her family’s rent; a twenty-four-year-old soldier from Peachtree City, Georgia, who loses both legs in a misguided, mismanaged, seemingly endless war; a young woman, only recently engaged, who suffers devastating injuries in a tragic bridge collapse in Minneapolis; and a group of parents in Pittsburgh who courageously fight back against the politicians who decimated funding for their children’s schools.
Herbert reminds us of a time in America when unemployment was low, wages and profits were high, and the nation’s wealth, by current standards, was distributed much more equitably. Today, the gap between the wealthy and everyone else has widened dramatically, the nation’s physical plant is crumbling, and the inability to find decent work is a plague on a generation. Herbert traces where we went wrong and spotlights the drastic and dangerous shift of political power from ordinary Americans to the corporate and financial elite. Hope for America, he argues, lies in a concerted push to redress that political imbalance. Searing and unforgettable, Losing Our Way ultimately inspires with its faith in ordinary citizens to take back their true political power and reclaim the American dream.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Former New York Times columnist Herbert (America's Urban Crisis and the Advent of Color-blind Politics) describes how the "great promise of America" has been tarnished by foreign policy decisions, chronic unemployment, income inequality, and political gridlock. As in his columns, Herbert ardently defends those being left behind in this current "winner-take-all" economy. As he travels across the U.S. interviewing the jobless and wounded, as well as noted educators, economists, activists and political leaders, he focuses on the four issues most pressing to him infrastructure, employment, public education, and ending our "profoundly debilitating," military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan. What emerges from his chronicle is a devastating portrait of a country where one in six people is officially poor; the top three private sector employers (Wal-Mart, Yum! Brands and McDonald's) provide non-unionized, low-wage, part-time jobs with few benefits; 12% of the nation's bridges are "structurally deficient"; and suicide among veterans is at record levels. Herbert convincingly argues that while public schools are doing better than detractors indicate (American test scores are dragged down by the U.S.'s greater social inequality), reforms like high-stakes testing, vouchers, and charter and online schools have not helped. Herbert ends by urging bold new leadership against an "intolerable status quo" and pointing to encouraging examples of citizen groups rising up across the country.
Customer Reviews
Losing Our Way
This book is 90% about the current condition. Most of us already know this. What is really needed is a plan and call to action. Only 10% of the book addresses this more important topic, and it is quite superficial. We need someone to lead us to action. This isn't it.