Poverty in America Awareness MonthLike this list

23 items

• Rethinking Rescue

  Dog Lady and the Story of America's Forgotten People and Pets

  Mithers, Carol Lynn,

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  "In Los Angeles's most underserved communities, Lori Weise is known as the Dog Lady, the woman who's spent decades caring for people in poverty and the animals that love them."

• Life Underground

  Encounters With People Below the Streets of New York

  Williams, Terry M. (Terry Moses), 1948-

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  "Between 1991 and 1996, sociologist Terry Williams visited a stretch of underground tunnels beneath New York's Upper West Side, spanning 72nd through 96th Streets. He did this hundreds of times, and then revisited his contacts repeatedly in the…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Fear of Too Much Justice

  Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts

  Bright, Stephen B., 1948-

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  "A legendary lawyer and a legal scholar reveal the structural failures that undermine justice in our criminal courts. 'The Fear of Too Much Justice' offers a timely, trenchant, firsthand critique of our criminal courts and points the way toward a…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Poverty, by America

  Desmond, Matthew,

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  "The Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a new and bracing argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it. The United States, the richest country on earth,…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Dying of Whiteness

  How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland

  Metzl, Jonathan, 1964-

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  "With the rise of the Tea Party and the election of Donald Trump, many middle- and lower-income white Americans threw their support behind conservative politicians who pledged to make life great again for people like them. But as Dying of Whiteness…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• American Dream

  Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare

  DeParle, Jason

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  A critically acclaimed reporter for The New York Times provides an in-depth study of the conflict between government social policy and the realities of life in post-welfare America, focusing on the lives of three women in a single extended family.…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Warmth of Other Suns

  the Epic Story of America's Great Migration

  Wilkerson, Isabel

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  In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Hand to Mouth

  Living in Bootstrap America

  Tirado, Linda,

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  "I've been waiting for this book for a long time. Well, not this book, because I never imagined that the book I was waiting for would be so devastatingly smart and funny, so consistently entertaining and unflinchingly on target. In fact, I would…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Hillbilly Elegy

  a Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

  Vance, J. D.,

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  Shares the story of the author's family and upbringing, describing how they moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan that included the author, a Yale Law School graduate, while navigating the demands of middle class life and the collective…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Our Kids

  the American Dream in Crisis

  Putnam, Robert D.

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  "A groundbreaking examination of the growing inequality gap from the bestselling author of Bowling Alone: why fewer Americans today have the opportunity for upward mobility. It's the American dream: get a good education, work hard, buy a house, and…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Glass Castle

  a Memoir

  Walls, Jeannette

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  The child of an alcoholic father and an eccentric artist mother discusses her family's nomadic upbringing, during which she and her siblings fended for themselves while their parents outmaneuvered bill collectors and the authorities.

• Nickel and Dimed

  on (not) Getting by in America

  Ehrenreich, Barbara

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  Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, the author decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job, any job, can be the ticket to a…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Maid

  Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive

  Land, Stephanie,

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  A journalist describes the years she worked in low-paying domestic work under wealthy employers, contrasting the privileges of the upper-middle class to the realities of the overworked laborers supporting them.

• Where We Stand

  Class Matters

  hooks, bell, 1952-2021,

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  Drawing on both her roots in Kentucky and her adventures with Manhattan coop boards, bell hooks provides a successful black woman's reflection, personal, straightforward, and rigorously honest on how our dilemmas of class and race are intertwined,…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• On the Clock

  What Low-wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

  Guendelsberger, Emily,

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  A college-educated young professional details the grueling realities of hourly labor for the fastest-growing segment of the American workforce while outlining strategies for more humane employment practices.

• Broke in America

  Seeing, Understanding, and Ending US Poverty

  Goldblum, Joanne Samuel, 1964-

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  Joanne Samuel Goldblum, CEO and founder of the National Diaper Bank Network, and Colleen Shaddox, a journalist and activist, give a book shedding light on the realities faced by those living in poverty across the United States and provide a road map…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Give People Money

  How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World

  Lowrey, Annie,

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  Imagine if every month the government deposited $1,000 into your bank account, with nothing expected in return. It sounds crazy. But it has become one of the most influential and hotly debated policy ideas of our time.

• $2.00 a Day

  Living on Almost Nothing in America

  Edin, Kathryn J.

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  A revelatory account of poverty in America so deep that we, as a country, don't think it exists Jessica Compton's family of four would have no cash income unless she donated plasma twice a week at her local donation center in Tennessee. Downloadable…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Squeezed

  Why Our Families Can't Afford America

  Quart, Alissa,

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  Families today are squeezed on every side—from high childcare costs and harsh employment policies to workplaces without paid family leave or even dependable and regular working hours. Many realize that attaining the standard of living their parents…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Evicted

  Poverty and Profit in the American City

  Desmond, Matthew,

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  A Harvard sociologist examines the challenge of eviction as a formidable cause of poverty in America, revealing how millions of people are wrongly forced from their homes and reduced to cycles of extreme disadvantage that are reinforced by…Read moreRead more of this annotation