Traveling Light

Kath Weston's ethnographic account of her journeys on Greyhound buses throughout the US is kind of stunning in an understated way. Traveling Light: On the Road with America's Poor is rich with anecdotes about the members of the working poor and underclass who she encounters. There are so many stories here, so many characters, that you get a wonderful sense of the breadth and contours of American poverty, without feeling beaten over the head with it.

Interspersed with analysis of class, race, the economy, etc, Traveling Light brings these stories into perspective, and the work is thoughtful and compassionate.

My favorite chapter was the last one, that chronicles her experience of the South prior to Katrina. And most important to me was the beginning of the author's note at the end:

"Anyone who writes about what it means to live without ready access to cash knows how hard it is to break with genre conventions and refuse to play the voyeur. How many volumes have been written in which well-meaning elites go slumming in order to regale a middle-class readership with stories of hardship?"

I was glad she wrote this, because it eloquently captures the problem I had with Nickel and Dimed, and Weston managed to avoid that voyeurism -- I'm not sure how exactly... somehow her perspective didn't intrude on the material, somehow she took the people she met and the experiences she had at face value without serving them to her readers with a sense of "can you believe how much this sucks?!". I really appreciated her writing and the sensibility which came across in this work.