"Piven, the noted political scientist who along with her late husband, Richard Cloward, has long studied and advocated for political empowerment strategies for the American poor, offers a sampling of her academic articles prompted by the conservative radio host Glenn Becks virulent attacks on her. Reaching as far back as the early 1960s and concluding with a recent biographically detailed interview between the author and activist-philosopher Cornel West, Piven (Challenging Authority) eloquently dissects the structures of political influence. She concludes that disruptive actions by the poor (i.e., actions short of violence, such as rent strikes, that break the rules of the game) remain virtually the sole political means of addressing inequalities in a system from which they are largely excluded. Piven asks essential questions about and proposes solutions for the increasingly unequal distribution of political power (tied of course to the increasingly narrow concentration of economic power). After debt-ceiling deals and austerity cuts in the U.S., and riots in poor communities across England, these insightful, well-argued essays prove historically informative and remarkably timely, a true find for the general reader looking to make sense of political power in an imperfect democracy." (Publisher's Weekly) Check Our Catalog
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