A Book Review of Mark Peel’s ‘The Lowest Rung’

Book Review ‘The Lowest Poverty Rung: Voices of the Australian Poverty’ is a book that gives an account of the impact of the growing economic dependency. It is based on 300 interviews that were conducted with people from three main localities which included Inala, located outside Brisbane, Melbourne’s Northwest as well as Mt. Druitt which was a housing commission in the suburbs of Sydney (Peel, 2003). On reading the book, I feel that among the people that Peel discusses, the Australian born is among the poor, and they have been displaced in the suburbs. According to the author, these people are often pushed into poverty because of accumulating misfortune such as sickness, retrenchment, gambling, marriage or accidents. From this point of view, I can say that it is evident that there are circumstances that the author out rightly declares that were some of the reasons for poverties in these areas. The accumulating misfortunes can be an easy way of concluding for the reason of poverty in some areas (Pearson, 2011). However, it is essential to note that being poor is not as it used to be in the past. For example, Peel states that in the past, being poor was taken as a sort of class which was a bit alienated. Today, matters have changed the poor is not just a class but a state that is not favorable enough for anyone to be in.