Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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55 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Buy this book, 27 Mar 2005
I picked up this book at 10am on a Saturday. At 10.30am I rang around and cancelled my plans. By 8pm I had finished it, and have spent innumerable hours since then trying to get everyone I meet to read it.
Frightening and wholly absorbing, this book draws you into the darkness of poverty in Britain and presents it to the reader in a manner so unflinching it leaves you in shock.
The thing which stays with you most after putting this book down is a sense of new understanding of the vicious circle of poverty, which grips generation after generation in abject hopelessness.
Please, please read this book. Then tell your freinds.
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82 of 84 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
an eye opener, 11 Mar 2003
In this book, Nick Davies takes his readers on a tour into the worst estates in the country, into the lives of the nastiest and most abused people. He tells a tale of impoverished Britain. And while, as you'd expect from a Guardian journalist, he makes his arguments against the government policies which create and sustain poverty, his real gift lies in recounting human tales. These stories of child prostitution and crack addiction among other things will disgust, anger and appall you. But the sensation that remains with me some five years since I read the book is one of sadness. I hadn't previously considered the fact that there might be so much unhappiness and despair in this country. Behind all thse tales of crime, exploitation, cruelty and poverty, Davies finds the human stories.
I've always tended to avoid gangs of menacing looking teenagers who lurk around in town centres, and I'll admit to gagging and turning away when a smelly old lady sits next to me on the bus. And I cetainly don't make a habit of visiting the roughest part of towns. So while my own background is certainly not one of wealth, I was pretty ignorant about the poorest parts of our society. It is this section of British society, pushed to the margins of both our physical space and our national consciousness that Davies reveals. It starts innocently enough, at the fair. Here, amidst all the tacky but harmles fun and commerce, he spots two young boys lurking by the public loos. He befriends them, and we follow him as he learns about their lives as rent boys, their family history, their friends. Before you know it, you're in a hellish place, a place occupied by a few million people in this country. It sounds morbid as hell, maybe even self indulgent. But its not. It's the finest piece of extended journalism I've ever read. It is at once well researched and extremeley moving.
If, like the vast majority of politicians and voters in Britain, you can't remember why we should tackle these issues head on, then you'd do well to read this book.
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25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Every bit as sensational as the title, 3 Oct 2004
There are few other books I have tried to persuade others to read as much as this outstanding exploration of the reality of poverty in Britain and its impact. Resorting to a cliche - this book is essential reading for anyone who is at all serious in understanding British politics. Nick Davies has tried to look at the impact of poverty on people's lives from the inside - the experience of moving from affluence to the world of the poor he compares to visiting a strange country. And the country he visits is an inhospitable one indeed - cruel, violent and miserable.
Whether it is the children from Nottingham who have become prostitues, a Leeds estate practically abandoned by the police, the Caribbean immigrants who learned the hard way that the colour of their skin barred them from their aspirations for a better life, the life of young women who sell themselves for drugs or out a lack of other options, the 11 year-old criminal pro - Davies finds a world that is gruesome and heartbreaking, all just streets away from the middle classes that ignore them. While laying out the reality of crime, police corruption, unemployment, despair, tuberculosis, damp, broken families, racist violence and much else in shocking detail this book is much more than a litany of tragedy. He tears open the self-serving myths about how the poor are deemed responsible for their own plight with example after example. Davies explains the politics of poverty - how this country of the poor was created and how the Conservative governments of Thatcher and Major brought the severe impoverishment of a quarter of Britain's population about, and writing in 1997, he notes how little the incoming Labour government intended to do about the problem.
There have been improvements since 1997, but this book remains terribly relevant. It is not always easy to read, but you really should.
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