🧲 Books like this
Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood
Jay MacLeod · back to the book
What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorPoverty, by America
Matthew Desmond · 343 pages
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.
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
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.
Class Matters
The New York Times · 268 pages
The Condition of the Working Class in England
Friedrich Engels · 336 pages
"The Condition of the Working Class is the best-known work of Engels, and in many ways still the best study of the working class in Victorian England. It was also Engels's first book, written during his stay in Manchester from 1842 to 1844. Manchester was then at the very heart of the Industrial Revolution and Engels compiled his study from his own observations and detailed contemporary reports. 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
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
Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class
Noam Scheiber · 384 pages
The Souls of Black Folk
W.E.B. Du Bois · 192 pages
Du Bois' 1903 collection of essays is a thoughtful, articulate exploration of the moral and intellectual issues surrounding the perception of blacks within American society.
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
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
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.
The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates
Wes Moore · 250 pages
Two kids with the same name lived in the same decaying city. One went on to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated combat veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison. Here is the story of two boys and the journey of a generation. In December 2000, the Baltimore Sun ran a small piece about Wes Moore, a local student who had just received a Rhodes Scholar
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
Silvia Federici · 285 pages
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass
Douglas S. Massey, Nancy Denton · 304 pages
Traces the development and consequences of white society's attempts to segregate and isolate blacks as they migrated from the South to other parts of America during the 20th century.
More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City
William Julius Wilson · 206 pages