How long does it take to read Ain't No Makin' It?
Jay MacLeod
Ain't No Makin' It by Jay MacLeod takes about 5 hours 51 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 51 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1987. 319 pages, about 87,725 words.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 45 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 51 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 39 minutes |
The page count is the median across 16 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The author immersed himself in the teenage underworld of Clarendon Heights. The Hallway Hangers, one of the neighborhood cliques, appear as cynical self-destructive hoodlums. The other group, the Brothers, take the American Dream to heart and aspire to middle-class respectability. The twist is that the Hallway Hangers are mostly white; the Brothers are almost all black. Comparing the two groups, MacLeod provides a provocative account of how poverty is perpetuated from one generation to the next. This edition retains the vivid accounts of friendships, families, school, and work that made the first edition so popular. The ethnography resonates with feeling and vivid dialogue. But the book also addressed one of the most important issues in modern social theory and policy: how social inequality is reproduced from one generation to the next. MacLeod links individual lives with social theory to forge a powerful argument about how inequality is created, sustained, and accepted in the United States.
Subjects: Ambition, Case studies, Equality, Social mobility, Socially handicapped youth, Urban poor
