What has the writer done to engage you, the reader, in a relationship with the book’s content?

Jacob Riis uses a combination of statistics, facts, and personal examples to engage the reader. His goal is to engage the reader to such an extreme level that the reader feels compelled to do something about the issue at hand. His most effective method of engaging the reader I felt was his anecdotes about real people living in the tenements. He told stories about mothers so destitute that they could not care for their children and left them on the doorsteps of wealthier households. He told a story about two elderly sisters who had made their livings as seamstresses, but now were going blind and could not work. With no family to take care of them, the only option left for them was to wait until starvation took over. For me, I was most affected when I could picture a face of the people actually going through these tragedies and hardships. Riis also sometimes used statistics, saying X % of people in tenements make under Y dollars a month. These numbers were arbitrary to me; I am reading this book in the 21st century when it was written in the 19th. Inflation has occurred; rent on a tenement no longer is 12 dollars a month. I have nothing to compare that to and those numbers are meaningless to me. Of course, I understand that Riis did not write this book with the expectation that people would read it over one hundred years later and he did not have that in mind when putting in his statistics. His goal was for his readers to become aware of the atrocities occurring in the New York tenements, and for his purpose hard cold facts would do the job very nicely.