Gang Leader for a Day

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.

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

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

Alex Kotlowitz · 323 pages

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.

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

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

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

Suketu Mehta · 542 pages

A native of Bombay, Suketu Mehta gives us an insider's view of this stunning metropolis. He approaches the city from unexpected angles, taking us into the criminal underworld of rival Muslim and Hindu gangs; following the life of a bar dancer raised amid poverty and abuse; opening the door into the inner sanctums of Bollywood; and delving into the stories of the countless villagers who come in sea

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

Nickel 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.

Sidewalk

Mitchell Duneier · 383 pages

"In Sidewalk, Mitchell Duneier takes us back to the streets of the Village, but finds a scene very different from the one Jacobs described. Much of the architecture remains, and many people live the way Jacobs suggested, but there is another population in the Village today - poor black men who make their livelihoods on the sidewalks by selling secondhand goods, panhandling, and scavenging books a

Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

Jonathan Kozol · 284 pages

Amazing Grace is a book about the hearts of children who grow up in the South Bronx - the poorest congressional district of our nation. Without rhetoric, but drawing extensively upon the words of children, parents, and priests, this book does not romanticize or soften the effects of violence and sickness. One fourth of the child-bearing women in the neighborhoods where these children live test po

The Dancing Girls of Lahore: Selling Love and Saving Dreams in Pakistan's Pleasure District

Louise Brown · 328 pages

The dancing girls of Lahore inhabit the Diamond Market in the shadow of a great mosque. The twenty-first century goes on outside the walls of this ancient quarter but scarcely registers within. Though their trade can be described with accuracy as prostitution, the dancing girls have an illustrious history: Beloved by emperors and nawabs, their sophisticated art encompassed the best of Mughal cultu

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.

Material World: A Global Family Portrait

Peter Menzel, Charles C. Mann · 255 pages

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States

Seth Holmes · 264 pages

"Based on five years of research in the field (including berry-picking and traveling with migrants back and forth from Oaxaca up the West Coast), Holmes, an anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, uncovers how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care."--

$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

Class Matters

The New York Times · 268 pages

Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI

Madhumita Murgia · 320 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").

Poverty, by America

Matthew Desmond · 343 pages

Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil

Nancy Scheper-Hughes · 621 pages

"When lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When people are assaulted by daily acts of violence and untimely death, what happens to trust? Set in the celebrated parched lands of Northeast Brazil, Death Without Weeping is a luminously written, "womanly hearted" account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness, and death that centers on the lives of the women and children of a

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

George Packer · 448 pages

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.