Name Gary Rivlin | Role Journalist | |
Books The Plot to Get Bill Gates, Broke - USA: From Pawnsho, The Godfather of Silicon, Katrina: After the Flood, Fire on the Prairie: Harold W | ||
Gary rivlin on broke usa
Gary Rivlin (born June 20, 1958) is an American journalist and author. He has worked for several different papers, including the Chicago Reader, the Industry Standard, The Investigative Fund, and the New York Times.
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Rivlin grew up in North Woodmere, New York and graduated from George W. Hewlett High School and Northwestern University.
In addition to his work in journalism, Rivlin has written several books. In 1992, he published "Fire on the Prairie: Chicago's Harold Washington and the Politics of Race," a book about Chicago area politics that won the Carl Sandburg Award for best non-fiction book of the year.
His second book, "Drive By", was published in 1995 while he worked for the East Bay Express, where he served as a staff writer and then executive editor. The book was inspired by the drive-by shooting of 13-year-old Kevin Reed in Oakland, California in 1990. Rivlin examined, as he put it, "the human side of this country's youth violence epidemic."
Rivlin then wrote two books about technology, "The Plot to Get Bill Gates" and "The Godfather of Silicon Valley", and won two Gerald Loeb Awards honoring excellence in business journalism.
In 2010, he published "Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. — How the Working Poor Became Big Business," which The New Yorker's James Surowiecki described as a "blistering new investigation of the subprime economy." In it, Rivlin explored how payday lenders, pawn shops, and check cashers exploit the impoverished in the United States. Despite attempting to remain objective, he sided with the activists who tried to rein in on the most usurious practices.
In 2015, he published "Katrina: After the Flood," about the immediate and long-term effects of Hurricane Katrina on the City of New Orleans.