With summer started and the goddess still working, I've been working odd hours and doing a fair bit of shuttling boys around. It's been a great time to catch up on my reading...

Years ago, I read Class in America and the things that stuck me most was the smugness of the author and his desperate creation of a non-class group to fit himself and the people he liked in. Not only was being middle class a horror to him, but this magical classless group he creates so he can avoid it reads like left-over hippies. The book left a bad enought taste in my mouth that I avoid the subject. So I was pleasantly surprised when I found Payne's book "A Framework for Understanding Proverty" where the author is more interested in teaching kids how to overcome the programs running in the background than in proving how cool she is. What I found really interesting was the similarity in some discriptions of poverty-linked behavior patterns and some of the stuff from in Marc MacYoung's books and writing on street survivial.  In context, the two make a lot of sense. Ms. Payne is supposedly trying to do a scholarly work on the same material. It will be interesting to see how that comes one.