What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorNickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Barbara Ehrenreich · 240 pages
The author's experience holding low-wage jobs in three parts of the U.S. in the late 1990s.
The Road to Wigan Pier
George Orwell · 230 pages
A searing account of George Orwell's observations of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1930s, The Road to Wigan Pier is a brilliant and bitter polemic that has lost none of its political impact over time. His graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, cramped slum housing, dangerous mining conditions, squalor, hunger and growi
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.
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
Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
Owen Jones · 298 pages
"In this groundbreaking investigation, Owen Jones explores how the working class has gone from 'salt of the earth' to 'scum of the earth'. Moving through Westminster 's lobbies and working-class communities from Dagenham to Dewsbury Moor, Jones lays bare the ignorance and prejudice at the heart of the chav caricature, and reveals a far more complex reality: the increasing poverty and desperation o
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
Returning to Reims
Didier Eribon, George Chauncey, Michael Lucey · 255 pages
On thinking the matter through, it doesn't seem exaggerated to assert that my coming out of the sexual closet, my desire to assume and assert my homosexuality, coincided within my personal trajectory with my shutting myself up inside what I might call a class closet. -- from Returning to Reims After his father dies, Didier Eribon returns to his hometown of Reims and rediscovers the working-class w
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
J.D. Vance · 272 pages
From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, this book is a probing look at the struggles of America's white working class through the author's own story of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town. Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis - that of poor, white Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for over fo
A People's History of the United States
Howard Zinn · 702 pages
Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, *A People's History of the United States* is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of -- and in the words of -- America's women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers.
Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class
Noam Scheiber · 384 pages
The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels · 56 pages
"The Communist Manifesto," penned by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, is a revolutionary treatise advocating for the overthrow of capitalist systems and the establishment of a classless society. Published in 1848, its succinct yet powerful prose remains a cornerstone of socialist ideology, inspiring movements worldwide.
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.
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
Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams
Alfred Lubrano · 256 pages
This work of narrative nonfiction uncovers a cultural phenomenon, the limbo existence of people raised in blue-collar families, living white-collar lives. Its approach is threefold: first, the personal story of the author himself, a working-class kid from Brooklyn who crossed over to the middle class after attaining an Ivy League education; second, a distillation of thought about class and mobilit
The Jungle
Upton Sinclair · 342 pages
Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the appalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was c
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
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
Pierre Bourdieu · 613 pages
The Making of the English Working Class
E.P. Thompson · 848 pages
Thompson turned history on its head by focusing on the political agency of the people, whom historians had treated as anonymous masses.
The Power Elite (Galaxy Books)
C. Wright Mills · 430 pages
In this classic of social science and social criticism, Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills examines and critiques the organization of power in the United States in the post-war era, calling attention to three interlocking groups of power--the military, corporate, and political elite--and exploring whether America is as democratic in practice as it is in theory.
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
Friedrich Engels · 216 pages
Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class
Michelle Tea · 240 pages
The 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