Poverty in Japan has been concealed in the chorus of admiration recognizing the nation becoming the world's second largest economy in the latter half of the 20th century.

Questions conventional thinking about wealth and poverty - is the opposite of poverty really wealth, or is it safety and sufficiency? Drawing on experience of poor people all over the world, the author shows how we all need to live more modestly to make poverty history, and that poverty is everywhere, not just in poor countries.

Argues that as a nation Australia can afford to eliminate financial poverty. The fact that we don't do so is a matter of choice, not affordability as the experience of other countries demonstrates. In challenging this idea, this book focuses on how looking at poverty differently can help to make a world without poverty a practical reality.

Discusses what the author calls 'Three Great Poverty Eradication Myths': that we can donate people out of poverty, that national economic growth will end poverty, and that Big Business, operating as it does, will end poverty. This work shows that programs based on such ideas have failed; in fact in sub-Saharan Africa, poverty rates have gone up.

The spokesman for redneck America is back - and this time it's personal.

When Joe Bageant returned to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, he rediscovered his redneck roots: 'the great beery, NASCAR-loving, church-going, gun-owning America that has never set foot in a Starbucks' . But he soon realised that these were the very people who had carried George W. Bush to victory.