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.

Why did you choose this book? What were your expectations? Why did you expect what you did? How is the book living up to your expectations?

The summer before I started sixth grade, I went to Manhattan for a week to stay with my aunt and uncle. They invite each of their nieces and nephews to visit them when they are about twelve or thirteen, and it was my turn to go. My uncle wanted to find lots of fun things to show me in the city, and one of them was a tenement museum. We visited this tenement that had been preserved and had actors playing the residents. They designed the inside to look like it was inhabited by a lot of families, and the actors described tenement life to us. It was absolutely fascinating, and it left me with an extremely romanticized vision of what life was like back then. One story that I found particularly interesting was how in order to get gas into the tenement, the tenants dropped a coin into a slot in the machine and the gas would be pumped in. At the end of the month, the landlord would collect the money. Most of the tenants couldn't afford the gas, so they would slice potatoes into the size and shape of the coins and drop those down the slot. The problem with that was that at the end of the month the landlord would find the potato slices. So what they figured out was to cut ice into the right shape and use that. That way they could get gas, but the evidence would melt and the landlord would never know. I thought the creativity of the tenants was fascinating, but I also recognized the horrible situations they must have been in to be forced to come up with schemes like this to do simple things like cook and heat their homes.

The Christmas after I visited him, my uncle gave me this book. I was really excited to read it, but then I read the first few pages and realized it was going to be really hard. So I waited a few years, and now I think I can actually read it without falling asleep. Its still hard though, since it was written in the late 1890s. And even though I'm interested in the content, I still find the book really boring, but I'm trying!

Does the author seem to make any particular effort to compel you to read the book? If so, what? How effective is this strategy?

I finished A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare and am now reading How the Other Half Lives by Jacob A. Riis.

Jacob Riis definitely wanted people to read his book because he was passionate about its content, and he was passionate about its content because he had lived it. He was born in Ribe, Denmark and immigrated to New York when he was very young. He was one of the lucky ones, however, and was able to find work and avoid the worst tenements. His first-hand experience with the tenements came from his work as a police reporter at New York's police headquarters on Mulberry Street which is the "heart of the Lower East Side slum district." This familiarity lead to his usage of his journalism to let the public know of the horrible conditions in the New York Tenements.

His main tool to compel people to read his book is his photography. When he wrote How the Other Half Lives, he was already well-known for his photographic skills. His usage of flash photography was a very useful tool in photographing the horrible conditions of the tenements. He emphasizes in his book how dark the tenements were; the inner rooms received no light or ventilation. Almost every page of his book has some sort of photograph or other visual aid to help the reader grasp his revulsion towards the conditions of the tenements, whether it is a floor plan of one of the tenements, a picture of the residents, or a chart with mortality rates in New York vs. the tenements alone.