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If You Liked Hillbilly Elegy poverty in America
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$2.00 a day : living on almost nothing in America
by Kathryn Edin
A revelatory assessment of poverty in America examines the survival methods employed by households with virtually no income to illuminate disturbing trends in low-wage labor and income inequality.
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All over but the shoutin'
by Rick Bragg
In a critically acclaimed memoir, a correspondent for The New York Times recounts growing up in the Alabama hill country, the son of a violent veteran and a mother who tried to insulate her children from poverty and ignorance.
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The American way of poverty : how the other half still lives
by Sasha Abramsky
Fifty years after Michael Harrington published his groundbreaking book The Other America, in which he chronicled the lives of people excluded from the Age of Affluence, poverty in America is back with a vengeance. It is made up of both the long-term chronically poor and new working poor-the tens of millions of victims of a broken economy and an ever more dysfunctional political system. In many ways, for the majority of Americans, financial insecurity has become the new norm. The American Way of Poverty shines a light on this travesty.
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Coming apart : the state of white America, 1960-2010
by Charles A. Murray
The controversial best-selling author of The Bell Curve presents a sobering critique of the white American class structure that argues that the paths of social mobility that once advanced the nation are now serving to further isolate an elite upper class while enforcing a growing and resentful white underclass, with culturally disastrous potential.
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Evicted : poverty and profit in the American city
by Matthew Desmond
A Harvard sociologist examines the under-represented 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 dysfunctional legal systems.
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The glass castle : a memoir
by Jeannette Walls
Breathtaking memoir about surviving a childhood with dysfunctional, nonconformist parents, and crafting a successful adulthood while coming to terms with the past. Heartbreaking yet hopeful memoir, this book was made into a feature film this year. -Rebecca
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Hand to mouth : living in bootstrap America
by Linda Tirado
A first book by a widely read, controversial essayist on poverty profiles the realities of the working poor in America and why poor people make decisions that are popularly criticized.
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The liar's club : a memoir
by Mary Karr
A trenchant memoir of a troubled American childhood from the child's point of view describes growing up in a an East Texas refinery town, life in the midst of a turbulent family of drunks and liars, a schoolyard rape, and other dark secrets.
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Nickel and dimed : on (not) getting by in America
by Barbara Ehrenreich
In an updated edition of her best-selling, landmark study, the sharp social critic and author of Fear of Falling looks underneath the illusion of American prosperity at poverty and hopelessness in America, with a new afterword that offers a revealing look at the continuing plight of the underpaid and how the current economic situation affects them.
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Nomadland : surviving America in the twenty-first century
by Jessica Bruder
An award-winning journalist sets out on the road to explore the new phenomenon of “workampers” who are migrant workers made up of transient older Americans who took to the road after discovering that their social security came up short and their mortgages were underwater.
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The other Wes Moore : One Name, Two Fates
by Wes Moore
Traces the parallel lives of two youths with the same name born a year apart in the same community, describing how the author grew up to be a Rhodes Scholar, White House Fellow and promising business leader while his counterpart suffered a life of violence and imprisonment.
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Our towns : a 100,000-mile journey into the heart of America
by James and Deborah Fallows
For the last five years, James and Deborah Fallows have been traveling across America in a single-prop airplane, visiting small cities and meeting civic leaders, factory workers, recent immigrants, and young entrepreneurs, seeking to take the pulse and discern the outlook of an America that is unreported and unobserved by the national media.
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Poor people
by William T. Vollmann
The award-winning author of Europe Central and Rising Up and Rising Down meditates on the diversity of poverty in a series of vignettes through which he shares interviews with impoverished people from around the world who draw on a range of belief systems to account for their financial disadvantages.
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Ramp Hollow : the ordeal of Appalachia
by Steven Stoll
An original investigation into the rise of the Appalachian homestead explores the impact of coal mining, timber and other industries on victimizing and marginalizing the region, sharing insights into how Appalachia became wrongly associated with poverty and backwardness.
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Squeezed : Why Our Families Can't Afford America
by Alissa Quart
The executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, examines the lives of many middle-class Americans who can now barely afford to raise children. Through gripping firsthand storytelling, Quart shows how our country has failed its families. Her subjects—from professors to lawyers to caregivers to nurses—have been wrung out by a system that doesn’t support them, and enriches only a tiny elite.
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White Trash : The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
by Nancy Isenberg
A history of the class system in America from colonial times to the present illuminates the crucial legacy of the underprivileged white demographic, challenging popular notions about equality while citing the pivotal contributions of lower-class white workers in wartime, social policy and the rise of the Republican party. By the author of Fallen Founder.
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The working poor : invisible in America
by David K. Shipler
An intimate portrait of poverty-level working families from a range of ethnic backgrounds in America reveals their legacy of low-paying, dead-end jobs, dysfunctional parenting, and substance abuse and charges the government with failing to provide adequate housing, health care, and education.
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Cedar Mill Community Libraries 12505 NW Cornell Road Suite 13 Portland, Oregon 97229 503-644-0043library.cedarmill.org/
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