Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America

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").

How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character

Paul Tough · 256 pages

Why do some children succeed while others fail? The story we usually tell about childhood and success is the one about intelligence: success comes to those who score highest on tests, from preschool admissions to SATs. But in this book the author argues that the qualities that matter most have more to do with character: skills like perseverance, curiosity, conscientiousness, optimism, and self-con

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

A Framework for Understanding Poverty

Ruby K. Payne · 205 pages

Bridges Out of Poverty: Strategies for Professionals and Communities

Ruby K. Payne, Philip E. DeVol, Terie Dreussi Smith · 293 pages

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

George Packer · 448 pages

Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

Barbara Ehrenreich · 248 pages

"Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed explored the lives of low-wage workers. Now, in Bait and Switch, she enters another hidden realm of the economy: the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed." "Bait and Switch highlights the people who've done everything right - gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive resumes - yet have become repeatedly vulnerable t

Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class

Noam Scheiber · 384 pages

$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

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.

Gang Leader for a Day

Sudhir Venkatesh

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

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.

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.

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

Class Matters

The New York Times · 268 pages

Poor People

William T. Vollmann · 464 pages

“The book struggles to confront poverty in all its hopelessness and brutality, its pride and abject fear, its fierce misery and its quiet resignation. ‘Poor People’ allows the poor to speak for themselves, explaining the causes and consequences of their impoverishment in their own cultural, social, and religious terms.” -Publisher

Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood

Jay MacLeod · 319 pages

The author immersed himself in the teenage underworld of Clarendon Heights. The Hallway Hangers, one of the neighborhood cliques, appear as cynical self-destructive hoodlums. The other group, the Brothers, take the American Dream to heart and aspire to middle-class respectability. The twist is that the Hallway Hangers are mostly white; the Brothers are almost all black. Comparing the two groups, M

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

Matt Taibbi · 432 pages

"Matt Taibbi's genius is in untangling complex stories and making us care about them by providing striking moral clarity and a genuine sense of outrage. He has become among the most read journalists in America, leading the dialogue with epic Rolling Stone pieces that offer an "almost startling reminder of the power of good writing" (Washington Post). In this new work, he once again takes readers i

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

The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table

Tracie McMillan · 330 pages

"In 2009 McMillan embarked on a groundbreaking undercover journey to see what it takes to eat well in America. For nearly a year, she worked, ate, and lived alongside the working poor to examine how Americans eat when price matters"--Jacket.

Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won't Do

Gabriel Thompson · 317 pages

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,