Social workers produced thousands of case files about the poor during
the interwar years. Analyzing almost two thousand such case files and
traveling from Boston, Minneapolis, and Portland to London and
Melbourne, Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse is a
pioneering comparative study that examines how these stories of poverty
were narrated and reshaped by ethnic diversity, economic crisis, and
war.
Probing the similarities and differences in the ways Americans,
Australians, and Britons understood and responded to poverty, Mark Peel
draws a picture of social work that is based in the sometimes fraught
encounters between the poor and their interpreters. He uses
dramatization to bring these encounters to life--joining Miss Cutler and
that resurrected horse are Miss Lindstrom and the fried potatoes and Mr.
O'Neil and the seductive client--and to give these people a voice.
Adding new dimensions to the study of charity and social work, this book
is essential to understanding and tackling poverty in the twenty-first
century.