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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Noam Scheiber · 384 pages

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.

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

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").

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

Alex Kotlowitz · 323 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

Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI

Madhumita Murgia · 320 pages

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.

By the Lake of Sleeping Children

Luis Alberto Urrea · 187 pages

Luis Alberto Urrea's first book, Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border, was a haunting and unprecedented look at what life is like for those living on the Mexican side of the border, eking out only the barest of lives not far from the white sands and coral reefs of Southern California. His poignant, widely acclaimed account of the struggle of these people to survive amid the

Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools

Jonathan Kozol · 262 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

China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

Howard W. French · 304 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,

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

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

George Packer · 448 pages

Class Matters

The New York Times · 268 pages

Gang Leader for a Day

Sudhir Venkatesh

Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market

Eric Schlosser · 320 pages

In Reefer Madness, the best-selling author of Fast Food Nation investigates America's black market and its far-reaching influence on our society through three of its mainstays -- pot, porn, and illegal immigrants. The underground economy is vast; it comprises perhaps 10 percent -- perhaps more -- of America's overall economy, and it's on the rise. Eric Schlosser charts this growth, and finds its r

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."--

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

Matthew Desmond · 442 pages

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is a 2016 non-fiction book by American author Matthew Desmond. Set in the poorest areas of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the book follows eight families struggling to pay rent to their landlords during the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Through a year of ethnographic fieldwork, Desmond's goal in the book is to highlight the issues of extreme poverty, afford