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Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market
Eric Schlosser · back to the book
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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.
China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa
Howard W. French · 304 pages
Janesville: An American Story
Amy Goldstein · 351 pages
"A Washington Post reporter's intimate account of the fallout from the closing of a General Motors' assembly plant in Janesville, Wisconsin--Paul Ryan's hometown--and a larger story of the hollowing of the American middle class. This is the story of what happens to an industrial town in the American heartland when its factory stills--but it's not the familiar tale. Most observers record the immedi
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner · 320 pages
*A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything* Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But
Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion
Elizabeth L. Cline · 258 pages
Evaluates the costs of low-priced clothing while tracing the author's own transformation to a conscientious shopper, a journey during which she visited a garment factory, learned to resole shoes, and shopped for local, sustainable clothing.
Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class
Noam Scheiber · 384 pages
The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket
Benjamin Lorr · 328 pages
The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India
Siddhartha Deb · 253 pages
Siddhartha Deb grew up in a remote town in the northeastern hills of India and made his way to the United States via a fellowship at Columbia. Six years after leaving home, he returned as an undercover reporter forThe Guardian, working at a call center in Delhi in 2004, a time when globalization was fast proceeding and Thomas L. Friedman declared the world flat. Deb's experience interviewing the c
Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
Evan Osnos · 416 pages
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
Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery
Siddharth Kara · 320 pages
"Across eighteen countries and six continents, Siddharth Kara has witnessed firsthand the sale of human beings into slavery, interviewed more than five hundred slaves of all kinds, and confronted some of those who trafficked and exploited them. In this book he draws on his background in finance and law to provide the first ever business and economic analysis of contemporary slavery worldwide, focu
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
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.
Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture
Ellen Ruppel Shell · 296 pages
An Atlantic correspondent uncovers the true cost—in economic, political, and psychic terms—of our penchant for making and buying things as cheaply as possibleFrom the shuttered factories of the rust belt to the look-alike strip malls of the sun belt—and almost everywhere in between—America has been transformed by its relentless fixation on low price. This pervasive yet little examined obsession is
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.
Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town
Nick Reding · 272 pages
The dramatic story of the methamphetamine epidemic of the 1980s as it sweeps the American heartland--a moving, very human account of one community's attempt to battle its way to a brighter future. Crystal meth is widely considered the world's most dangerous drug, but especially so in the small towns of the American heartland. Journalist Reding tells the story of Oelwein, Iowa (pop. 6,159), which,
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond · 343 pages
The Candy Machine: How Cocaine Took Over the World
Tom Feiling · 320 pages
Cocaine is big business and getting bigger. Governments spend millions on an unwinnable war against it, yet it's now the drug of choice in the West. How did the cocaine economy get so huge? Who keeps it running behind the scenes?In The Candy Machine Tom Feiling travels the trade routes from Colombia via Miami, Kingston and Tijuana to London and New York. He meets Medillin hitmen, US kingpins, Braz
Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett
Jennifer Gonnerman · 356 pages
"Life on the outside is an account of one woman's struggle to win her freedom and change her life; it is also an extraordinary feat of reporting, one that makes vivid the real-life effects of the rough justice meted out to the poorest of the poor." "The book tells the story of Elaine Bartlett, who spent sixteen years in prison for a single sale of cocaine - a consequence of New York State's contro
Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic
Sam Quinones · 377 pages
Sam Quinones chronicles how, over the past 15 years, enterprising sugar cane farmers in a small county on the west coast of Mexico created a unique distribution system that brought black tar heroin-- the cheapest, most addictive form of the opiate, 2 to 3 times purer than its white powder cousin-- to the veins of people across the United States.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Tom Wolfe · 416 pages
One of the most essential works on the 1960s counterculture, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Test is the seminal work on the hippie culture, a report on what it was like to follow along with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as they launched out on the "Transcontinental Bus Tour" from the West Coast to New York, all the while introducing acid (then legal) to hundreds of like-minded folks, stagi
City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
Mike Davis · 462 pages
Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won't Do
Gabriel Thompson · 317 pages