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Author
Description
Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis -- that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside.
Author
Description
"A history of the class system in America from the colonial era to the present illuminates the crucial legacy of the underprivileged white demographic, citing the pivotal contributions of lower-class white workers in wartime, social policy, and the rise of the Republican Party,"--NoveList.
3) Empire falls
Author
Description
Miles Roby has been slinging burgers at the Empire Grill for 20 years, a job that cost him his college education and much of his self-respect. What keeps him there? It could be his bright, sensitive daughter Tick, who needs all his help surviving the local high school. Or maybe it's Janine, Miles' soon-to-be ex-wife, who's taken up with a noxiously vain health-club proprietor. Or perhaps it's the imperious Francine Whiting, who owns everything in...
4) Incendiary
Author
Appears on list
Description
Distraught over the deaths of her husband and son in a suicide bombing at a London soccer match, a woman writes a letter to Osama bin Laden to persuade him to abandon his terror campaign.
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Physical Desc
213 pages ; 22 cm
Description
"When Colin Barrett's debut Young Skins was published, it swept up several major literary awards, and, in both its linguistic originality and sharply drawn portraits of working-class Ireland, earned Barrett comparisons to Faulkner, Hardy, and Musil. Now, in a blistering follow-up collection, Barrett brings together eight character-driven stories, each showcasing his inimitably observant eye and darkly funny style. A quiet night in a local pub is shattered...
Author
Description
Named by the Guardian as one of our top ten writers of rural noir, Bonnie Jo Campbell is a keen observer of life and trouble in rural America, and her working-class protagonists can be at once vulnerable, wise, cruel, and funny. The strong but flawed women of Mothers, Tell Your Daughters must negotiate a sexually charged atmosphere as they love, honor, and betray one another against the backdrop of all the men in their world. Such richly fraught mother-daughter...
Author
Description
Just after her mother's funeral, five-year-old Holly is dropped off by her father at her grandfather's South Carolina dairy farm. It will be 30 years before Holly sees her father again-plenty of time to develop a fondness for drinking and video poker. And also plenty of time to contemplate why her father abandoned her.
9) The jungle
Author
Series
Description
In this powerful book we enter the world of Jurgis Rudkus, a young Lithuanian immigrant who arrives in America fired with dreams of wealth, freedom, and opportunity. And we discover, with him, the astonishing truth about "packingtown," the busy, flourishing, filthy Chicago stockyards, where new world visions perish in a jungle of human suffering. Upton Sinclair,...
Author
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
Through the lives of real Americans, Kristof and WuDunn address the crisis in working-class America, while focusing on solutions to mend a half century of governmental failure. Rural Yamhill, Oregon, prospered for much of the twentieth century but has been devastated in the last few decades as blue-collar jobs disappeared. About one-quarter of the children on Kristof's old school bus died in adulthood from drugs, alcohol, suicide, or reckless accidents....
11) Martin Eden
Author
Description
The semiautobiographical story of an impoverished seaman who pursues, obsessively and aggressively, dreams of education and literary fame.
Author
Pub. Date
2024.
Physical Desc
x, 75 pages ; 22 cm
Description
"The award-wining poet returns to his home place in the Pacific Northwest, where the neighborhood simmers with the chemical presence of human trouble, and sparks of beauty coexist with danger. This sound-driven, image-driven collection carries us to the lower-middle class Portland neighborhood of Lents, where Dickman was raised by a single mother. Here, as a skateboarding boy practices his kick-flip on the street, enlightenment simmers under the surface...
Author
Description
"After sixteen novels, Jacqueline Winspear has taken the bold step of turning to memoir, revealing the hardships and joys of her family history. Both shockingly frank and deftly restrained, her memoir tackles such difficult, poignant, and fascinating family memories as her paternal grandfather's shellshock, her mother's evacuation from London during the Blitz; her soft-spoken animal-loving father's torturous assignment to an explosives team during...
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Description
Normandy, France, 1970s. Anne is transitioning from middle school to high school. She expresses her feelings about her parents, her education, and her sexual encounters, growing more mature but also conflicted and unhappy. In leaving behind the innocence of her middle school years, Anne must navigate the often-confusing signals she receives from boys, while also moving further away from her parents as she surpasses their educational level and worldview.--...
16) Sons and lovers
Author
Description
Paul Morel's childhood and early manhood in the English midlands are deeply affected by his devotion to and concern for his dominating mother.
Author
Appears on list
Description
"Mike Muñoz is a young Mexican American not too many years out of high school--and just fired from his latest gig as a lawn boy on a landscaping crew. Though he tries time and again to get his foot on the first rung of that ladder to success, he can't seem to get a break. But then things start to change for Mike, and after a raucous, jarring, and challenging trip, he finds he can finally see the future and his place in it"--
Author
Pub. Date
2010
Physical Desc
30 p. : ill. (some col.), maps ; 28 cm.
Description
The quality of a persons life in ancient Roman times much like that of today depended largely on their livelihood. The rich patricians traditionally focused their wealth on land ownership and the less wealthy commoner did most of the farming, artisanship, trading, and construction. In this book, the occupations of ancient Romans are investigated through first and accounts, detailed illustrations, and fact panels that focused on key figures of Roman...
Author
Description
"Layoffs upend people's lives, cause enormous stress, and lead to debilitating personal debt. The societal harm caused by mass layoffs has been known for decades. Yet, we do little to stop them. Why? Why do we allow whole communities to be destroyed by corporate decision-makers? Why do we consider mass layoffs a natural, baked-in feature of modern financialized capitalism? In Wall Street's War on Workers, Les Leopold, co-founder of the Labor Institute,...
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