Poor People
William T. Vollmann
HarperCollins
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.

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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.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* In Rising Up and Rising Down (2003), intrepid writer of conscience Vollmann conducted an all-out investigation into violence. He now turns his voracious attentiveness to another pillar of human suffering and another subject swamped with ambiguity--poverty. A writer of epic empathy impelled to visit hot spots all over the world, Vollmann, winner of the National Book Award for his novel Europe Central (2005), has created a bracing mix of risky oral history, passionate social observation, and bold interpretation that illuminates not only the obvious deprivations suffered by poor people but also the impoverishment of their inner lives. Vollmann speaks with fellow Americans and with people in places he has come to know rather well for an outsider, including Thailand, Russia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kazakhstan, and Mexico. The individuals Vollmann portrays, the frank questions he asks, and the fatalistic responses he records reveal the vast "dimensions of poverty" and our feeling of helplessness when confronted with so much pain. But for all the sorrow Vollmann catalogs, his persistent and compassionate pursuit of the truth reminds us of all that we share as human beings and all that we can do for each other. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
About the Author
William T. Vollmann is the author of seven novels, three collections of stories, and a seven-volume critique of violence, Rising Up and Rising Down. He is also the author of Poor People, a worldwide examination of poverty through the eyes of the impoverished themselves; Riding Toward Everywhere, an examination of the train-hopping hobo lifestyle; and Imperial, a panoramic look at one of the poorest areas in America. He has won the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction, a Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize and a Whiting Writers' Award. His journalism and fiction have been published in The New Yorker, Esquire, Spin and Granta. Vollmann lives in Sacramento, California.