Jacob Riis How The Other Half Lives Sparknotes

In the book “How the Other Half Lives” by Jacob A. Riis, the author’s main purpose for writing this book was to provide a voice for the hard-working people who had to live in these poor living conditions. The author believed that any hard-working man’s story should be told and that’s exactly what he wanted to do with this book. I believe he was successful at doing this because not only did the author provide a voice for these people, but he also was able to inform the public and government about the horrific living conditions in which they were living in. Jacob August Riis was born on May 3rd, 1849 in Denmark, and he migrated to the United States in 1870. Jacob had different jobs here in the U.S. one of them was as a police reporter for the New York Tribune (Jacob, “Contemporary”). Riis also worked as a muckraking journalist, which was a journalist who looked to show the public and the government certain issues in society. He has written a great number of books, which are mostly muckraking stories like

The reason why I say this is because there are some areas of the book that the author loses the reader while reading. For example, when the author says, “General Baxter street 1,918 315 2’233 26 46 72 13.56 146.02 32.24” (Riis, 35), this is where Riis loses his reader because these numbers are confusing to a person when reading. Instead what he should of have done was include these numbers in a side chart to have the reader look at after reading that section. However other than that Riis does a good job of making his sentences easy to understand and not to complex, which is seen when he says, “Mrs. Astor set an example during her noble and useful life in gathering… homeless boys from-the streets,” (Riis, 111). This quote shows how the sentences that Riis uses are easy to follow and aren’t too complex to read, which is a good thing because it helps the reader not lose interest in the