At St. John's Bread and Life, a soup kitchen in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, more than a thousand people line up for breakfast and lunch five days a week. During the twelve-year era of welfare reform, William DiFazio observed the daily lives of poor people at St. John's and throughout New York City.

In this trenchant and groundbreaking work, DiFazio presents the results of welfare reform—from ending entitlements to diminished welfare benefits—through the eyes and voices of those who were most directly affected by it. Ordinary Poverty concludes with a program to guarantee universal rights to a living wage as a crucial way to end poverty. Ultimately, DiFazio articulates the form a true poor people's movement would take—one that would link the interests of all social movements with the interests of ending poverty.

William DiFazio is Professor of Sociology at St. John's University. He is the author of Longshoremen: Community and Resistance on the Brooklyn Waterfront and co-author (with Stanley Aronowitz) of The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work.

"The heart and soul of Ordinary Poverty is the ethnography of St. John's Bread and Life soup kitchen. The greatest strength of the book, however, is the way in which DiFazio's text moves seamlessly from ethnography to high social theory and back again, in chapter after chapter of poignant prose and provocative analysis."—Jonathan Cutler, Wesleyan University

"Bill DiFazio's powerful and prophetic voice is badly needed in our time. Don't miss it!"—Cornel West, University Professor of Religion, Princeton University

"A vivid portrait of poverty in the U.S. and its roots in contemporary politics and policy. We see and hear the people who are down and out, and the people who reach out to help them. More than that, DiFazio gives us a compelling theoretical analysis of why poverty worsens and how this trend might be reversed."—Frances Fox Piven, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology, Graduate School of the City University of New York