Love, Sorrow, and Rage

Reviews / Votes

"A brilliant ethnography of women on the edge... Waterston is one of our best urban ethnographers, mixing intelligent fieldwork and sheer novelistic splendor in a masterful work. A must-read. This book should be standard for every ethnographic methods and theory course on urban life, women, poverty, and race." -Terry Williams, New School for Social Research "Love, Sorrow, and Rage tells us something powerful and intimate about a group of poor women living in the wealthiest city on the face of the earth. In the process, Alisse Waterston demolishes a series of myths about the 'urban underclass' that have perverted both social theories and social policies. Indeed, Waterston has succeeded where an entire generation of anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists has failed: she renders in vivid detail, and with a towering passion of her own, the ways in which ostensibly impersonal forces-racism, gender inequality, ill-conceived social policies-come to have their effect in poor women's lives. Accountable to a large literature but unshackled from the constraints of jargon, Love, Sorrow, and Rage takes flight as bitter and persuasive poetry. It should be required reading for physicians, social workers, policy-makers-indeed, for all those fortunate enough to meet women whose lives have been damaged by the structural forces that come alive in this remarkable and harrowing book." -Paul Farmer, Harvard Medical School "A moving and beautiful book. In so much of what is written about 'the homeless' and 'the mentally ill,' the people themselves are missing. Alisse Waterston brings out their humanity. Nothing can replace an experience, but reading a book like this is the next best thing." -Ezra Susser, Columbia University