Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass

Reviews

Novelist

My only critique: it gets a little bit boring towards the end. He is, after all, widely published, if not widely quoted by the afore-mentioned bourgeois liberal elites. 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.

Marcellino Furtado

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. I came to this book with my guard up.

Well, hell, here was someone who has actually spent his working life down in the trenches with those "at the bottom". But Dalrymple does not reserve his barely contained anger for them.

This a very relevant, important and interesting book. I highly recommend it; especially if you live in a high population area.

Reading this may cause you to rethink some of your friendships. Yes, Dalrymple is a gifted essayist, but he makes his points with a unique blend of real life anecdotes and sympathetic analysis. Their product is the virtue signal, and their marketplace is publishing, mainstream media and (of course) academia.

Quite the contrary: his anger is exquisitely focussed on the elites who have designed and implemented the bureaucratic systems behind welfarism. Social commentary is dominated by the bourgeois liberal elites whose world view is shaped by their guilt at being educated, employed and all-knowing. 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. So, despite having heard that Dalrymple was a wonderful essayist, I approached him with hesitation.