Analysis of How The Other Half Lives - Book Report/Review Example

 How the Other Half Lives The book How the Other Half Lives, by Jacob Riis, is about life among the poor people who lived in New York City at the end of the 1800s. It contains both stories of people's lives as Riis witnessed them, basic descriptions of the poor parts of the city, and lots of photographs and pictures of the conditions he saw there. The book's theme is depressing, and its purpose is a good one, although it may not have been as successful as the author would have liked, judging from his introduction to the book. Ultimately, what I enjoyed and did not enjoy about the book came from the same thing, which was what Riis was writing his book in response to. Regardless, it did give me a good picture of some of the problems America faced in the 1800s and the move to Modern America. The theme of the book is poverty, and how it affects people and makes their lives miserable. There are numerous stories in the book with this theme, as well as ones where people just carry on living even in spite of the poverty. There are also statistics, such as the number of those families who were below the poverty line or the fact that one in ten people who died in New York from 1885-1890 was buried in the graveyard reserved for those without any money (243). The author's purpose to the book was to show people in America who lived in wealth or middle class homes that not everybody in the country was so lucky, and to make them think about how lucky they were and probably also to see if they could do something about it. As Riis says in the introduction to the book, in history "the half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat" (1). According to Riis, most of this had happened in the distant past, but it was still the case in New York City, which was newer than most places and had only recently experienced large populations of the poor moving into it at once (2). The question he wants to ask with the book is "What are you going to do about it" (3)? In the rest of the introduction, Riis suggests ways that the American people, and the government of New York specifically, could actually do something about it. He suggests that employers need to build houses for their impoverished workers so that the tenements can be destroyed, and the sad, distressing lives they cause can go with them (4). In keeping with the time he lived in, Riis ends his introduction, and the most explicit statement of his purpose, by calling on people's better, "Christian" nature, which today would perhaps not always be the case (5). Although How the Other Half Lives probably did make a slight change for the better when it was published, and people were no doubt shocked to learn all this stuff that they would have preferred not to think about, the effect obviously did not last very long. If you look at big cities today, there are still the same kinds of injustices and inequalities going on. For instance, there is Los Angeles, which has a lot of homeless people and where people do not even care about them. Probably this is partly because of how old this book is. Even people who have read it today can just dismiss it as describing the life of the poor a hundred years ago, and not now. One of the most effective things about the book, which really made the problems it talked about easy to see and understand, was the photographs. They are spread throughout the book, and illustrate scenes such as market scenes (109) or people working on cigars in the same apartments that they live in, which are very small (143). These photographs are usually accompanied by text talking about them, and which make it really come to life even now, over one hundred years after the time the book was first published. The mix of different types of book did make this a little hard to read at times. It was confusing to see Riis switch from sort of neutral reporting where he just describes the problems the poor face, such as how "an epidemic ... is excessively fatal among the children of the poor, by reason of the practical impossibility of isolating the patient in a tenement" (167) to talking about a specific instance of an epidemic, where the author himself found a patient "stretched upon two chairs in a dreadfully stifling room ... gasping in the agony of peritontis that had already written its death-sentence on her wan and pinched face" (168). At times these changes are rapid and a little confusing. Most of the time, though, Riis actually uses these shifts in type of storytelling very effectively, to make a single point three or four different ways, and to bring home the reality of the situation he's just been talking about as a newspaperman. One instance is the last chapter, which basically sums up the entire book to that point and also restates Riis' introduction and its call to people's Christian goodness. In this chapter, Riis talks about a man, presumably made up to illustrate a point, who was standing on a street corner with a knife, "poor, and hungry, and ragged" and thinking of the injustice of his situation compared to the rich driving by in carriages (263). This section was really good, because the man ends up "in a mad-house, forgotten" and then Riis talks about how the world just keeps going, ignorant of him (264). The message here was very shocking, because it was basically accusing the reader of not caring, after reading everything they had just read, by asking if they were going to carry on forgetting and not caring or do something about it. Since this technique is usually successful, it was not the thing I liked least about the book. In fact, strange as it may sound, the real thing that makes this book so hard to read is the knowledge that it is not made up. This is nothing that could be fixed by the author, because if he had removed the depressing aspects of how the poor lived in New York, it would not have made a very effective tool to shock and horrify people into helping them in any way they could. Because of this, the book's greatest strength is also the thing I liked the least about it. Despite the book's age and its depressing nature, it was a fascinating read. In relation to this class, it is really interesting especially as it illustrates quite well the problems that America and its citizens went through as the country became more industrialized and more people moved to the cities and away from rural areas, where life might not have been as hard. In some ways, the book also points forward to much more recent times in America's history, because of the fact that many people living in poverty today live lives that are only slightly different, because of more electricity and other conveniences, but are more or less the same as they were over a hundred years ago. America has not perhaps changed as much as Riis, or we, would like. Works Cited Riis, Jacob A. How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1914. Print. Read More