There are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc · 424 pages

The result of over ten years of immersion reporting, "Random Family" charts a tumultuous decade in which girls become mothers, mothers become grandmothers, boys become criminals, and hope struggles against deprivation.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

Katherine Boo · 256 pages

The dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century's great, unequal cities. In this fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human. Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts

Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America

Leon Dash · 279 pages

For four years, reporter Leon Dash followed the lives of Rosa Lee Cunningham, her eight children, and five of her grandchildren, in an effort to capture the stark reality of life in the growing black underclass. As a black journalist troubled by the crisis in urban America, he wanted readers to share his discomfort and alarm. Dash's reports in the Washington Post touched a powerful nerve - 4,600

Gang Leader for a Day

Sudhir Venkatesh

Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools

Jonathan Kozol · 262 pages

This is London: Life and Death in the World City

Ben Judah · 390 pages

London is a global city. More than half of those who live in the UK's capital came from somewhere else - and most arrived in the last ten years. Migration is transforming London, for better and for worse. Ben Judah turns his reporter's eye on home, immersing himself in the hidden world of the city's immigrants - from the richest to the poorest - to discover the complex and varied individuals who a

Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago

Eric Klinenberg · 312 pages

A “social autopsy” (Klinenberg’s phrase) of Chicago’s citizens and institutions after the July 1995 heat wave that killed over 700 people.

The People of the Abyss

Jack London · 224 pages

Book of Jack London about life in the East End of London in 1902. He wrote the experiences of living in the East End for months, staying in workhouses or sleeping on the streets. The conditions he experienced and wrote would be the same as would have supported an estimated 500,000 poor in London at the time.

Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

Barbara Ehrenreich · 248 pages

"Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed explored the lives of low-wage workers. Now, in Bait and Switch, she enters another hidden realm of the economy: the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed." "Bait and Switch highlights the people who've done everything right - gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive resumes - yet have become repeatedly vulnerable t

Class Matters

The New York Times · 268 pages

Poor People

William T. Vollmann · 464 pages

“The book struggles to confront poverty in all its hopelessness and brutality, its pride and abject fear, its fierce misery and its quiet resignation. ‘Poor People’ allows the poor to speak for themselves, explaining the causes and consequences of their impoverishment in their own cultural, social, and religious terms.” -Publisher

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

Matt Taibbi · 432 pages

"Matt Taibbi's genius is in untangling complex stories and making us care about them by providing striking moral clarity and a genuine sense of outrage. He has become among the most read journalists in America, leading the dialogue with epic Rolling Stone pieces that offer an "almost startling reminder of the power of good writing" (Washington Post). In this new work, he once again takes readers i

The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City

Jennifer Toth · 267 pages

Thousands of people live in the subway, railroad, and sewage tunnels that form the bowels of New York City. This book is about them, the so-called "mole people" living alone and in communities, in the frescoed waiting rooms of long-forgotten subway tunnels and in pick-axed compartments below busway platforms. It is about how and why people move undergraound, who they are, and what they have to say

Detroit: An American Autopsy

Charlie LeDuff · 300 pages

An exposé of Detroit, icon of America's lost prosperity, from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie LeDuff. Back in his broken hometown, LeDuff searches through the ruins for clues to its fate, his family's, and his own. Once the richest city in America, Detroit is now the nation's poorest. It is an eerie and angry place of deserted factories and abandoned homes and forgotten people. LeDuff se

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

Matthew Desmond · 442 pages

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is a 2016 non-fiction book by American author Matthew Desmond. Set in the poorest areas of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the book follows eight families struggling to pay rent to their landlords during the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Through a year of ethnographic fieldwork, Desmond's goal in the book is to highlight the issues of extreme poverty, afford

The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table

Tracie McMillan · 330 pages

"In 2009 McMillan embarked on a groundbreaking undercover journey to see what it takes to eat well in America. For nearly a year, she worked, ate, and lived alongside the working poor to examine how Americans eat when price matters"--Jacket.

Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won't Do

Gabriel Thompson · 317 pages

How the Other Half Lives

Jacob A. Riis · 246 pages

A photographic collection exposing social conditions and daily life in the slums of late 19th century New York City. The title of the book is a reference to a sentence by French writer and philosopher François Rabelais, who famously wrote in his Pantagruel : "one half of the world does not know how the other half lives" ("la moitié du monde ne sait pas comment l'autre vit").

$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

Kathryn Edin, H. Luke Shaefer · 210 pages

"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. Modonna Harris and her teenage daughter Brianna in Chicago often have no food but spoiled milk on weekends. After two decades of brilliant research on American po

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

George Packer · 448 pages

A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi

Aman Sethi · 226 pages

Depicts the lives of a group of homeless friends living in the Old Delhi Railway Station in India and the adventures and misfortunes they experienced that ultimately brought each of them there.

Factory Girls: Voices From The Heart Of Modern China

Leslie T. Chang · 425 pages

An eye-opening and previously untold story, Factory Girls is the first look into the everyday lives of the migrant factory population in China.China has 130 million migrant workers--the largest migration in human history. In Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, tells the story of these workers primarily through the lives of two young women,

Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class

Noam Scheiber · 384 pages

Planet of Slums

Mike Davis · 256 pages

Mike Davis charts the expected global urbanization explosion over the next 30 years and points out that outside China most of the rest of the world's urban growth will be without industrialization or development, rather a 'peverse' urban boom in spite of stagnant or negative urban economic growth.