No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City.

• Author: Sosulski, Marya R.

No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City by Katherine S. Newman Knopf. 400 pages. $27.95.

Catherine S. Newman's latest book gives an unusual view of poverty. She and her graduate students at Columbia University talked with more than 300 Harlem residents who have jobs that don't pay living wages. And the researchers volunteered to work side-by-side with several of the residents. The result is No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City--a collection of compelling narratives about the lives of workers and their families, plus a discussion of the conditions that limit the economic possibilities of poor people in the United States.

An anthropologist who has spent many years researching various aspects of urban life and poverty, Newman has written extensively on these subjects. Recent books include Declining Fortunes: The Withering of the American Dream (Basic Books, 1994), and Falling from Grace: Downward Mobility in the Age of Affluence (University of California Press, 1999).

Newman came up with the idea for her current study while in the back of a taxicab in Harlem, preparing a talk she was scheduled to give for a conference on urban poverty. As she gazed out the window of the cab, she saw the neighborhood bustling with people on their way to work. This surprised her because a good deal of poverty research describes poor urban areas like Harlem as lifeless, depressing places, cluttered with people hanging around street corners with no place to go.

In No Shame in My Game, she argues that social science research has disproportionately focused on the plight of the unemployed ghetto-dweller or mothers on welfare. The media, too, depict welfare dependency as the natural state of poverty, while neglecting the majority of inner-city poor people who work. Newman cites the example of Rosa Lee Cunningham, a twenty-four-year-old single mother who combined work with illicit activities to support eight children but finally succumbed to drug addiction, prostitution, and pimping her own daughter to support her habit. Leon Dash made Rosa Lee famous and won a Pulitzer Prize for his series about her in The Washington Post. Since then, television and movies have favored similar images at the expense of showing poor households that are supported by legal--albeit insufficient--employment.

In fact, writes Newman, 69 percent of poor households have at least one working member. Many of the people Newman interviewed have held jobs at the...