Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx

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

Gang Leader for a Day

Sudhir Venkatesh

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

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

Alex Kotlowitz · 323 pages

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.

All Over But the Shoutin'

Rick Bragg · 329 pages

This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. It is the story of Bragg's father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the hab

Factory Girls: Voices From The Heart Of Modern China

Leslie T. Chang · 425 pages

An eye-opening and previously untold story, Factory Girls is the first look into the everyday lives of the migrant factory population in China.China has 130 million migrant workers--the largest migration in human history. In Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, tells the story of these workers primarily through the lives of two young women,

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,

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

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

Riding in Cars with Boys: Confessions of a Bad Girl Who Makes Good

Beverly Donofrio · 204 pages

Denied college, Beverly Donofrio lost interest in everything but riding around town in cars, drinking and smoking, and rebelling against authority. She got married and divorced and finally ended up in an elite New England university, books in one arm, child in the other. A book about the compromise between being your own person and fitting into society.

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 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.

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

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

George Packer · 448 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.

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

Hallie Rubenhold · 352 pages

Make Lemonade

Virginia Euwer Wolff · 200 pages

Viginia Euwer Wolff's groundbreaking novel, written in free verse, tells the story of fourteen-year-old LaVaughn, who is determined to go to college―she just needs the money to get there. When she answers a babysitting ad, LaVaughn meets Jolly, a seventeen-year-old single mother with two kids by different fathers. As she helps Jolly make lemonade out of the lemons her life has given her, LaVaughn

Les Misérables

Victor Hugo · 747 pages

In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean--a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert--Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre.

The other wes moore

Wes Moore · 250 pages

Love Me Back

Merritt Tierce · 220 pages

"Marie, a young single mother, lands a job at an upscale Dallas steakhouse. She is preternaturally attuned to the appetites of her patrons, but quickly learns to hide her private struggle behind an easy smile and a crisp white apron. In a world of long hours and late nights, where everything runs on a currency of favors, cash, and cachet, Marie gives in to brutally self-destructive impulses. She l

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets

David Simon · 619 pages

The scene is Baltimore. Twice every three days another citizen is shot, stabbed or bludgeoned to death. At the centre of this hurricane of crime is the city's homicide unit, a small brotherhood of hard men who fight for whatever justice is possible in a deadly world. David Simon was the first reporter ever to gain unlimited access to a homicide unit, and his remarkable book is both a compelling ac

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

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