Volume 54, Number 9 · May 31, 2007
Wretched of the Earth
By Nicholas D. Kristof
Poor People
by William T. Vollmann
Ecco, 450 pp., $29.95
Understanding Poverty
edited by Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, Roland Bénabou, and Dilip Mookherjee
Oxford University Press, 443 pp., $35.00 (paper)
No interview haunts me more than a conversation with a Cambodian peasant, Nhem Yen, in 1996. She was forty years old, though she looked much older, and was living with her family in a clearing in the Cambodian jungle. The area was notorious for malaria, but the family members were ambitious and industrious and figured that it was worth the risk to make more money by cutting wood for sale.
Review, 4053 words
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