Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author

David K. Shipler worked for The New York Times from 1966 to 1988, reporting from New York, Saigon, Moscow, and Jerusalem before serving as chief diplomatic correspondent in Washington, DC. He has also written for The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams; the Pulitzer Prize-winning Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land; and A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America.

The Working Poor: Invisible In America

Based on his New York Times best-seller The Working Poor: Invisible In America, David Shipler presents a searing, intimate portrait of working American families struggling against insurmountable odds to escape poverty. The invisible poor are engaged in the activity most respected in American ideology-hard, honest work. But their version of the American Dream is a nightmare: low-paying, dead-end jobs; the profound failure of government to improve upon decaying housing, health care, and education; the failure of families to break the patterns of child abuse and substance abuse. Shipler exposes the interlocking problems by taking us into the sorrowful, infuriating, courageous lives of the poor - white and black, Asian and Latino, citizens and immigrants - and makes pointed, informed recommendations for change.