Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass

Reviews

Marcellino Furtado

I came to this book with my guard up. Quite the contrary: his anger is exquisitely focussed on the elites who have designed and implemented the bureaucratic systems behind welfarism. He is, after all, widely published, if not widely quoted by the afore-mentioned bourgeois liberal elites.

Novelist

There are a lot of alarming insights in here that will be useful to any citizen of the modern first world. Social commentary is dominated by the bourgeois liberal elites whose world view is shaped by their guilt at being educated, employed and all-knowing.

Their product is the virtue signal, and their marketplace is publishing, mainstream media and (of course) academia. My only critique: it gets a little bit boring towards the end.

Reading this may cause you to rethink some of your friendships. So, despite having heard that Dalrymple was a wonderful essayist, I approached him with hesitation.

I highly recommend it; especially if you live in a high population area. Yes, Dalrymple is a gifted essayist, but he makes his points with a unique blend of real life anecdotes and sympathetic analysis.

But Dalrymple does not reserve his barely contained anger for them. This book has been helping me to recognize, and avoid at all costs, certain people because they want to live like trash and they dont want to improve themselves in anyway. A doctor and psychologist who works daily in the worst of Britain's slums and prisons dealing with the appalling by-products of social policy and its remorseless implementation of welfare dependency — with its consequential loss of self respect and self-determination. This a very relevant, important and interesting book.

Well, hell, here was someone who has actually spent his working life down in the trenches with those "at the bottom". Life at the bottom is truly awful, and many who exist there cannot be saved from the consequences of the choices they have continually made.