Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Description
"An eye-opening memoir of working-class poverty in the American Midwest. During Sarah Smarsh's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the forces of cyclical poverty and the country's changing economic policies solidified her family's place among the working poor. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country and examine the myths about...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.8 - AR Pts: 23
Language
English
Description
A poignant tale of childhood and the ties of family, "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" will transport the reader to the early 1900s where a little girl named Francie dreamily looks out her window at a tree struggling to reach the sky.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.1 - AR Pts: 18
Language
English
Description
"Two families, generations apart, are forever changed by a heartbreaking injustice in this poignant novel, inspired by a true story, for readers of Orphan Train and The Nightingale. Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family's Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge--until strangers arrive...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
A classic early example of "muck-racking" journalism, or reporting by reform-minded American journalists who attacked established institutions and leaders as corrupt, "How the Other Half Lives" is a chronicle of the conditions of abject poverty that the residents of the slums of New York endured at the end of the 19th century. Danish immigrant Jacob A. Riis saw first-hand the horrible conditions of the Lower East Side of Manhattan following his immigration...
6) Tobacco road
Author
Language
English
Description
The classic novel of a Georgia family undone by the Great Depression: “[A] story of force and beauty” (New York Post). Even before the Great Depression struck, Jeeter Lester and his family were desperately poor sharecroppers. But when hard times begin to affect the families that once helped support them, the Lesters slip completely into the abyss. Rather than hold on to each other for support, Jeeter, his wife Ada, and...
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.5 - AR Pts: 26
Language
English
Description
In the segregated South of the early 1960s, Mary Swan Middleton tries to cope with her grief over a family tragedy by reaching out to Atlanta's poor and meets Carl, who is her opposite in every way but helps her to see beyond her privileged life.
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"The Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a new and bracing argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it. The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and...
Author
Language
English
Description
After her farm for widows and orphans is devastated by fire in 1884, Christina Willems is determined to reopen it despite opposition. She finds an unlikely ally in local lumber mill owner Levi Johnson. Having been hurt by people in the past, Levi prefers solitude. But young Tommy Kilgore, one of Christina's residents, worms his way into Levi's affections. When Tommy and Christina are threatened, will Levi reach out and find healing from the scars...
12) Crenshaw
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 3.8 - AR Pts: 3
Language
English
Description
"A story about a homeless boy and his imaginary friend that proves in unexpected ways that friends matter, whether real or imaginary"--
13) Poor people
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
That was the simple yet groundbreaking question William T. Vollmann asked in cities and villages around the globe. The result of Vollmann's fearless inquiry is a view of poverty unlike any previously offered.
Poor People struggles to confront poverty in all its hopelessness and brutality, its pride and abject fear, its fierce misery and quiet resignation, allowing the poor to explain the causes and consequences of their impoverishment in their own...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.8 - AR Pts: 14
Language
English
Description
Profiles everyday life in the settlement of Annawadi as experienced by a Muslim teen, an ambitious rural mother, and a young scrap metal thief, illuminating how their efforts to build better lives are challenged by religious, caste, and economic tensions.
15) Coal river
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"In this vibrant new historical novel, the acclaimed author of The Plum Tree and What She Left Behind explores one young woman's determination to put an end to child labor in a Pennsylvania mining town... As a child, Emma Malloy left isolated Coal River, Pennsylvania, vowing never to return. Now, orphaned and penniless at nineteen, she accepts a train ticket from her aunt and uncle and travels back to the rough-hewn community. Treated like a servant...
16) The rainmaker
Author
Language
English
Description
In his final semester of law school, Rudy Baylor "finds himself taking on one of the most powerful, corrupt, and ruthless companies in America -- and exposing a complex, multibillion-dollar insurance scam."
Author
Publisher
Simon and Schuster
Pub. Date
[2018]
Language
English
Formats
Description
During Sarah Smarsh's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the forces of cyclical poverty and the country's changing economic policies solidified her family's place among the working poor. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country and examine the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less. Her personal history...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Cara Romero thought she would work at the factory of little lamps for the rest of her life. But when she loses her job in the Great Recession, she is forced back into the job market for the first time in decades. Set up with a job counselor, Cara instead begins to narrate the story of her life. She recounts her tempestuous love affairs, her relationships with her neighbor Lulu and her sister Angela, her struggles with debt, gentrification, and loss,...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Three days before Christmas, in the freezing slums of London's East End, thirteen-year-old Gracie Phipps and eight-year-old Minnie Maude Mudway join together in a search for Charlie, the donkey who belonged to Minnie Maude's Uncle Alf. Gracie is shocked to learn that only the day before, someone brutally murdered Uncle Alf and made off with his rag-and-bones cart and the beloved beast who pulled it.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8.5 - AR Pts: 12
Language
English
Formats
Description
Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job -- any job -- could be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on six to seven dollars an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever...
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