What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Shame Of The Nation: The Restoration Of Apartheid Schooling In America
Jonathan Kozol · 416 pages
"This is a book about betrayal of the young, who have no power to defend themselves. It is not intended to make readers comfortable." Visiting nearly 60 public schools, Kozol finds that conditions have grown worse for inner-city children in the 15 years since federal courts began dismantling the landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. First, the segregation of black children is at a l
How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character
Paul Tough · 256 pages
Why do some children succeed while others fail? The story we usually tell about childhood and success is the one about intelligence: success comes to those who score highest on tests, from preschool admissions to SATs. But in this book the author argues that the qualities that matter most have more to do with character: skills like perseverance, curiosity, conscientiousness, optimism, and self-con
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates · 155 pages
An Amazon Best Book of July 2015: Readers of his work in The Atlantic and elsewhere know Ta-Nehisi Coates for his thoughtful and influential writing on race in America. Written as a series of letters to his teenaged son, his new memoir, Between the World and Me, walks us through the course of his life, from the tough neighborhoods of Baltimore in his youth, to Howard University—which Coates dubs “
Bridges Out of Poverty: Strategies for Professionals and Communities
Ruby K. Payne, Philip E. DeVol, Terie Dreussi Smith · 293 pages
A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf · 129 pages
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on 24 October 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers of and characters in fiction, the m
Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood
Jay MacLeod · 319 pages
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, M
Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class
Noam Scheiber · 384 pages
The Establishment: And How They Get Away with It
Owen Jones · 288 pages
In The Establishment Owen Jones, author of the international bestseller Chavs, offers a biting critique of the British Establishment and a passionate plea for democracy. Behind our democracy lurks a powerful but unaccountable network of people who wield massive power and reap huge profits in the process. In exposing this shadowy and complex system that dominates our lives, Owen Jones sets out on a
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Michelle Alexander · 301 pages
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a 2010 book by Michelle Alexander, a civil rights litigator and legal scholar. The book discusses race-related issues specific to African-American males and mass incarceration in the United States, but Alexander noted that the discrimination faced by African-American males is prevalent among other minorities and socio-economicall
$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
No Logo
Naomi Klein · 512 pages
"What corporations fear most are consumers who ask questions. Naomi Klein offers us the arguments with which to take on the superbrands." Billy Bragg from the bookjacket.
Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War
Joe Bageant · 288 pages
After thirty years spent scratching together a middle-class life out of a "dirt-poor" childhood, Joe Bageant moved back to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, where he realized that his family and neighbors were the very people who carried George W. Bush to victory. That was ironic, because Winchester, like countless American small towns, is fast becoming the bedrock of a permanent underclass. T
Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools
Monique Morris · 277 pages
"Fifteen-year-old Diamond stopped going to school the day she was expelled for lashing out at peers who constantly harassed and teased her for something everyone on the staff had missed: she was being trafficked for sex. After months on the run, she was arrested and sent to a detention center for violating a court order to attend school. Black girls represent 16 percent of female students but almo
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
Nancy Isenberg · 460 pages
A history of poor whites in America, mainly in the South.
Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America
Linda Tirado · 240 pages
"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 like to have written it myself - if, that is, I had lived Linda Tirado's life and extracted all the hard lessons she has learned. I am the author of Nicke
Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010
Charles Murray · 407 pages
A critique of the white American class structure 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.
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
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
Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men
Leonard Sax · 309 pages
Readings for Diversity and Social Justice
Maurianne Adams, Carmelita Rosie Castaneda, Heather W. Hackman, Madeline L. Peters, Ximena Zuniga, Warren J. Blumenfeld · 652 pages
The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School
Alexandra Robbins · 436 pages
In a smart, entertaining, reassuring book that reads like fiction, Alexandra Robbins manages to cross Gossip Girl with Freaks and Geeks and explain the fascinating psychology and science behind popularity and "outcasthood." She reveals that the things that set students apart in high school are the things that help them stand out later in life. Robbins follows seven real people grappling with the u
Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self Esteem, and the Confidence Gap
Peggy Orenstein · 351 pages
In 1990, the American Association of University Women conducted a ground-breaking poll that highlighted how, as young girls reach adolescence, their self-esteem plummets. The conclusion of the study (an investigation that involved over three thousand girls and boys between the ages of nine and fifteen and cut across ethnic and regional lines) was alarming: there is a crisis in this country regardi
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

