Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
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
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
What J.D. needs is a little peace quiet. One tranquil evening, he takes off on a ride in the country -- and promptly has car trouble. He asks for help at an old farmhouse and finds a family living in abject poverty, and vows to help. When he returns with groceries, he can't find them or the house -- although he's not lost. While J.D. struggles to make sense of this riddle, his behavior creates doubt in his marriage, and his best friend thinks he's...
Author
Language
English
Formats
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
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
From the author of 1984, George Orwell narrates the journey of a writer among the down-and-out in two great cities in this sobering, truthful portrayal of poverty and society.
Famous for its realistic and unsentimental description of poverty, Down and Out in London and Paris follows the adventures of a penniless British writer who finds himself rapidly descending into the seedy heart of two great European capitals. As a dishwasher in Paris, he describes...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8.8 - AR Pts: 61
Language
English
Formats
Description
John Harmon returns to England as his father's heir. Believed drowned under suspicious circumstances--a situation convenient to his wish for anonymity--John evaluates Bella Wilfer whom he must marry to secure his inheritance. The story is filled with colorful Victorian characters and incidents -- the faded aristocrats and parvenus gathered at the Veneering's dinner table, Betty Higden and her terror of the workhouse and the greedy plottings of Silas...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Many Americans take comfort and convenience for granted. We eat at nice restaurants, order groceries online, and hire nannies to care for kids. Getting Me Cheap is a portrait of the lives of the low-wage workers-primarily women-who make this lifestyle possible. Sociologists Lisa Dodson and Amanda Freeman follow women in the food, health care, home care, and other low-wage industries as they struggle to balance mothering with bad jobs and without...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Mette Iversdatter's window was a porthole on the winter sky." Larry Woiwode brings us into the simple and anxious rhythms of life for a Norwegian farm girl in the first decade of the twentieth century. Christmas Eve falls in the midst of deprivation as Mette's family prepares to journey to her grandparent's farm. When her father fails to bag a big deer on the journey, they arrive, like everyone else, almost empty-handed. Yet despite frustration and...
Publisher
Living on One
Pub. Date
2013.
Language
English
Description
This award-winning documentary is a tool to help empower the extreme poor to take the first steps out of poverty. The film follows the story of four young friends who set out to live on just one dollar a day for eight weeks in rural Guatemala. They battle hunger, parasites and the realization that there are no easy answers. Yet, the generosity and strength of Rosa, a 20 year old woman, and Chino, a 12 year old boy gives them resilient hope that there...
10) Coal River
Author
Language
English
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...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.8 - AR Pts: 14
Language
English
Description
Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption....
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
A journalist and industry specialist for Reuters examines the growing disparity between the rich and the poor, taking a non-partisan look into the businesspeople who are amassing colossal fortunes and preferring the company of similar people around the world.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.8 - AR Pts: 23
Language
English
Description
"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" is the coming-of-age story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet fromative years in the turn-of-the-century Williamsburg slums of Brooklyn. This poignant and moving classic of American literature is filled with compassion and cruelty, laughter and heartache, crowded with life and incident.
14) Burn
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.1 - AR Pts: 13
Language
English
Description
On a cold Sunday evening in early 1957, Sarah Dewhurst waited with her father in the parking lot of the Chevron gas station for the dragon he'd hired to help on the farm... Sarah Dewhurst and her father, outcasts in their little town of Frome, Washington, are forced to hire a dragon to work their farm, something only the poorest of the poor ever have to resort to. The dragon, Kazimir, has more to him than meets the eye, though. Sarah can't help but...
Author
Language
English
Description
"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 poverty, Kathryn Edin noticed something she hadn't seen...
16) Unsettled ground
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"At fifty-one years old, twins Jeanie and Julius still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation in the English countryside. The cottage they have shared their entire lives is their only protection against the modernizing world around them. Inside its walls, they make music, and in its garden, they grow everything they need to survive. To an outsider, it looks like poverty; to them, it is home. But when Dot dies unexpectedly, the world they've...
Publisher
Family Home Entertainment
Pub. Date
[2004]
Language
English
Description
Tells the story of a princess and a pauper who were worlds apart in lifestyles, yet identical in looks. When chance brings them together, it becomes the beginning of a great adventure and a friendship that will last a lifetieme. When Anneliese is captured, Erika must pretend to be the princess to help find out what has happened and to save the real princess. In the end, the magic of love and friendship triumphs and the kingdom is saved.
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Description
"Kensington, Philadelphia, is distinguished only by its poverty. It is home to Ryan, Giancarlos, and Emmanuel, three Puerto Rican children who live among the most marginalized children and families in the United States. This is their coming-of-age story. It is also the story of families beset by violence-the violence of homelessness, hunger, incarceration, stray bullets, sexual and physical assault, the hypermasculine logic of the streets, and the...
Publisher
Kanopy Streaming
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
English
Description
Beginning in 1977, Andrew Kolker and Louis Alvarez produced a series of half-hour documentaries about New Orleans' challenges called Being poor in New Orleans. The programs were broadcast on WGNO-TV (Channel 26) and produced under the auspices of NOVAC, the New Orleans Video Access Center. Presenting some of the first independent TV documentaries made in New Orleans, the series was a pathbreaking look at New Orleans' problems and raised a number of...
Author
Publisher
Beacon Press
Pub. Date
[2018]
Language
English
Description
"The story of low-wage workers rising up around the world to demand respect and a living wage. We Are All Fast Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages traces the evolution of a new global labor movement sparked and sustained by low-wage workers from Manila to Manhattan, from Baja California to Bangladesh, from Capetown to Cambodia. This is an up close and personal look at globalization and its costs, as seen through the eyes and...
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