I first read Five Families when I was a 23yo public health nurse from the Midwest, working in a Mexican-American barrio in East Los Angeles. A co-worker advised me to read this book in order to better understand the families I found myself working with.
I devoured it.
Then I came to realize that it's a seminal work in modern cultural anthropology, a book that will surely stand the test of time, a 'study' written in a style that makes it accessible to all readers.
Five Families is a dramatic and forceful account five poor Mexican families. It's a book that will leave you changed.

I just read this book, as I have read his other works. Oscar Lewis gives an extensive complete examination into the lives of extreme poverty. He gives exacting detail of the homes, lifestyles, and characteristics of the poor in Mexico. The last chapter delves with the poor who have accomplished "some wealth" and their upbringing still manages to evolve the same as if they were still poor. Wonderful thorough book!

Lewis was able to go inside a family that trusted him enough to show just how difficult life can be. This book makes you think and shows you just how grinding poverty can eat away at ones soul. It also manages to show the vibrancy this family has. you are able to see the world from different members attempts at making a better life. It tells vividly how the streets of New York which hold so much promise ultimately cause most members of this family so much pain. This is a must read not only for latinos but for everyone. This book is more about the endurance of a soul as it is about ethnicity.

La Vida is an anthropological study that tells the story, in their own words, of an extended Puerto Rican family in San Juan and in New York. What a lively and colorful culture! If you want to get a sense of life among Puerto Ricans in the 1960s who exist low on the economic scale, this book will tell you everything you could possibly want to know about their individual lives from their perspective. The perspective is important because it can change the way the reader views a person until she hears that character's own voice. Every day I looked forward to "living" with this family.

I read this book as part of a college assingment many years ago; and I still keep all the characters in my heart.

It is a painful analysis of a family who faces poverty and all the uncertainty that comes with it. The loss of the mother and the lack of the father's affection for his children, makes for a story that was so painful at times; that I had to put it down and not deal with it for days at a time.

What makes it so great, it's the fact that is a true story and it leaves you with a sense of hope. Seeing how all the characters made it in the end, and still managed to love each other unconditionally. Read it only if you want to experience what is like to live in a vecindad in Mexico city; with all that comes with that!

I first read the "Silver Kings: The Lives and Times of MacKay, Fair, Flood, and O'Brien, Lords of the Nevada Comstock Lode", because there was a family story that James G. Fair might be a lost relative. If he is it's quite distant, but the book was so interesting that I've since read everything I could get my hands on about the Comstock Lode and it's characters. Virginia City really did more as the birth place of the myths and truths of the Old West than did Tombstone or Dodge City. I am also an "Earp" buff and have read much available on the "Gun Fight" related characters. Even Samuel Clemens, later known as Mark Twain, was a reporter for the Virginia City newspaper during his early days. The book was fantastic. I'm glad to see it in reprint as I will give it as gifts to some of my friends. I had hunted long and hard for my old copy. If you like stories of the Old West you will enjoy this one. And the stories are true.
Senator Mike Fair
Oklahoma State Senator

I picked up this book in Spanish at a public library, because I was researching for a work of fiction I am involved in. This book was a very realistic depiction of Puerto Ricans and "the culture of poverty" that sometimes seems so unsurmountable for anyone living in the lower strata of society. Their experience in the fifties and sixties --described here-- is now being lived by other groups of people who have migrated to the US and live in extreme poverty. I could identify with it, and I am not Puerto Rican.

It is never clear to what extent Oscar Lewis relies upon his fieldwork and to what extent he relies upon his imagination in this story about an impoverished Mexican family. Lewis certainly has an ax to grind and a theory to prove--that there is a "cycle of poverty" that entraps the poor in their own cultural malaise. This theory, popular in the 50s and still popular in its neo-liberal version today, is ill served by Lewis's fictionalized accounts that are disguised as fact. How did Lewis know this family so well? The answer is he probably didn't, but made up what he lacked in data so that his theory would come out on top. In this story it becomes tragically clear that the decisions of the individuals themselves are what are holding them back. From Lewis's liberal point of view, the failures are understandable but lamentable. The problem is, as I note above, it is really just a story. The family certainly did exist, and people in the neighborhood (Tepito) can point their house out to the curious stranger, but the details are all Oscar Lewises. The proof of the pudding is that Tepito is now a vibrant urban center despite its apparent poverty, and the likelihood is that it was always so--but Lewis couldn't see the forest for the theory.

Needless to say the neighborhood and the family felt ill-used when they discovered the use to which Lewis put his time with them (to say nothing of the ethnical dilemna of the fact that he was writing very salacious material about them when everyone around them knew who they were.

This book certainly makes interesting literature, but the reader should be aware of the author's profound biases. It also makes an interesting example for anthropologists--of how NOT to do research and how NOT to abuse your subjects.

This book certainly lacks scientific data and all the other scholarly details usually found in an anthropological study. But there's nothing scientific about poverty. Footnotes and graphs have no place in this kind of examination. It's an emotional book, intimately conveying the scorn and contempt of family that's half-starved and forced to live in claustrophobic conditions.

"The Children of Sanchez" documents all the petty hostilities within the fragile family unit. And it documents them accurately. Living in Mexico City is hard. Rich or poor, chilangos are constantly forced to deal with incredible violence and instability; the city is unforgiving and cruel, with terrible pollution levels and wild corruption. Lewis has perfectly captured the daily horrors of this urbanized mess. Using the Sanchez family as a case group representative of many families in the capital, he shows how people are slowly crushed by their relatives, the justice system and the congestion.

Nothing in this book is false or misleading. I have lived and worked in Mexico City; I have lived with a middle-class Mexican family; and I have started a family in Mexico. The experiences of the Sanchez family mirror my own experiences. I have met and have known many people like the people in this book. I have seen my own family spend countless hours attacking each other. And I have seen people desperately trying to make ends meet in a city with no opportunities.

Read this book. It's all true!

I haven't found a bopok so compelling years! What's fascinating is each of the protagonists have a decisive moment when they could have changed their lives and yet they fall back on their old ways.As sad as the story is, it's incredibly moving and in odd moments, uplifting. If ever there was a case to end the CUlture of Poverty, this is it.

The author relies on Austin's newspaper (no longer in print) called the Reese River Reveille to describe what every day life in Austin was like, from its founding in the 1860s to about the 1950s. Most of the book focuses on the 1860s, when Austin was founded as a mining town. The book then discusses its growth and development, the struggles of its inhabitants in an isolated location, and the hopes for Austin's own "place in the sun" as a premier western town.

The book is easy to read and very enjoyable. Having spent about a month in Austin this summer, I was pleasantly surprised to find this book in my college's library. Recommended for anyone interested in frontier history.

Although this is a useful book, and one frequently cited in bibliographies, Lewis tends to focus on perpetuating a myth (the "Big Four" as robber barrons) rather than substantive biography. It's practically all we have on Charles Crocker and Mark Hopkins, but far better biographies of C P Huntington are available: David F. Myrick's The Great Pursuader is excellent, and so is Cerinda Evan's Collis Potter Huntington. All three of the published biographies of Leland Stanford are well done, especially Clark's. This is a marginally useful book, but far better biographies of Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, and David Douty Colton need to be written. Lewis' remarks that Crocker in his later years was lethargic and obese are despicable given the Crocker's advanced state of complications from diabeties (which eventually killed him), especially considering that probably no other man in American history ever equalled his genius railroad construction. Buy it but beware its serious ethical shortcumings. -- these are my thoughts from one who has studied Southern Pacific history for nearly three decades.