Social Class

In her thought-provoking voice, Tirado discusses how she went from lower-middle class, to sometimes middle class, to poor and everything in between, and in doing so reveals why "poor people don't always behave the way middle-class America thinks they should."

When the sixth Earl Fitzwilliam died in 1902, he left behind the second largest estate in 20th-century England, valued at more than three billion dollars in today's money - a lifeline to the tens of thousands of people who worked either in the family's coal mines or on their expansive estate. The earl also left behind four sons, and the family line seemed assured. But was it?

Kerri Arsenault grew up in the rural working class town of Mexico, Maine. For over 100 years, the community orbited around a paper mill that employs most townspeople, including three generations of Arsenault’s own family. Years after she moved away, Arsenault realized the price she paid for her seemingly secure childhood. The mill, while providing livelihoods for nearly everyone, also contributed to the destruction of the environment and the decline of the town’s economic, physical, and emotional health in a slow-moving catastrophe.

“My adult life can be divided into two distinct parts”, Eula Biss writes, “the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after.” Having just purchased her first home, the poet and essayist now embarks on a provocative exploration of the value system she has bought into. Through a series of engaging exchanges - in libraries and laundromats, over barstools and backyard fences - she examines our assumptions about class and property and the ways we internalize the demands of capitalism.

Through the intimate stories of those seeking work, The Tolls of Uncertainty offers a startling look at the nation's unemployment system - who it helps, who it hurts, and what, if anything, we can do to make it fair. Drawing on interviews with 100 men and women who have lost jobs across Pennsylvania, Sarah Damaske examines the ways unemployment shapes families, finances, health, and the job hunt. Shaped by a person's gender and class, unemployment generates new inequalities that cast uncertainties on the search for work and on life chances beyond the world of work.

डॉ. बाबासाहेब आंबेडकर हे नाव आज सर्वांत आदरणीय भारतीयांच्या नामावलीत घेतलं जातं आणि देशभरातील त्यांच्या पुतळ्यांची संख्या महात्मा गांधींच्या पुतळ्यांखालोखाल असेल. किंबहुना, आधुनिक काळातील 'सर्वांत थोर भारतीय' ठरवण्यासाठी अलीकडे एक मतचाचणी घेण्यात आली, त्यात दोन कोटींहून अधिक मतं नोंदवली गेली आणि त्यात आंबेडकरांना गांधींपेक्षा जास्त मतं मिळाली होती.

From the immense staff running a lavish Edwardian estate and the lonely maid-of-all-work cooking in a cramped middle-class house to the poor child doing chores in a slightly less poor household, servants were essential to the British way of life. They were hired not only for their skills but also to demonstrate the social standing of their employers - even as they were required to tread softly and blend into the background. More than simply the laboring class serving the upper crust - as popular culture would have us believe - they were a diverse group that shaped and witnessed major changes in the modern home, family, and social order.

A History of the World in Six Plagues shows that throughout history, outbreaks of disease have been exacerbated by and gone on to further expand the racial, economic, and sociopolitical divides we allow to fester in times of good health. Princeton-trained historian Edna Bonhomme’s examination of humanity’s disastrous treatment of pandemic disease takes us across place and time from Port-au-Prince to Tanzania, and from plantation-era America to our modern COVID-19-scarred world to unravel shocking truths about the patterns of discrimination in the face of disease.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of young people pack their bags to study or volunteer abroad. Well-intentioned and curious Westerners travel to low-income countries to learn about people and cultures different from their own. In Beyond Guilt Trips: Mindful Travel in an Unequal World, storyteller Anu Taranath unpacks our baggage about who we are, where we come from, and how much we have. She takes us on a journey through personal travel stories and thought-provoking questions, providing us with tools to grapple with our discomfort and navigate differences with accountability and connection.

Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Messenger offers the first humane, journalistic expose of an American tragedy: modern-day debtor's prisons and how they've destroyed the lives of poor Americans.

When fifth grader Penny Lowry and her classmates get invited to go to New York City for a weekend hosted by Billy J. Plumberry, the famous author her school is named for, Penny finds a lot to worry about. After all, isn't the city full of aggressive bike messengers ready to run kids over? And what if she gets stuck in an elevator for life? Not to mention all the pianos falling out of windows everywhere! On the other hand, what if it might actually be fun to explore an exciting new place with some of her best friends?

American monopolies dominate, control, and consume most of the energy of our entire economic system; they function the same way as cancer does in a body, and like cancer, they weaken our systems while threatening to crash the entire body economics. American monopolies have also seized massive political power and use it to maintain their obscene profits and CEO salaries while crushing small competitors.

A self-proclaimed "myth buster by trade," Barbara Ehrenreich has covered an extensive range of topics as a journalist and political activist, and is unafraid to dive into intellectual waters that others deem too murky. Now, Had I Known gathers the articles and excerpts from a long-ranging career that most highlight Ehrenreich's brilliance, social consciousness, and wry wit.

Behind The Setting of a Country Club According to Inquisitive Jeff” by James Landsaw is a book that delves into the intriguing and often scandalous world of a country club. The story follows Jeff, a waiter at the club, who uncovers various aspects of life within this exclusive setting. The book explores themes such as gossip, corruption, lifestyles, sex, scandals, racism, drugs, lies, and politics, showing that these issues permeate all levels of society, regardless of class. Jeff’s inquisitive nature leads him to discover that whether one is rich, middle class, or poor, everyone faces ...

Each of them is one in a million. They number 6,000 on a planet of six billion. They run our governments, our largest corporations, the powerhouses of international finance, the media, world religions, and, from the shadows, the world's most dangerous criminal and terrorist organizations. They are the global superclass, and they are shaping the history of our time.

We all notice when the poor get poorer: when there are more rough sleepers and food bank queues start to grow. But if the rich become richer, there is nothing much to see in public and, for most of us, daily life doesn't change. Or at least, not immediately. In this astonishing, eye-opening intervention, world-leading philosopher and economist Ingrid Robeyns exposes the true extent of our wealth problem, which has spent the past fifty years silently spiralling out of control.

When Harry was five his mother married a coal miner. Loved by his new family, Harry embraced their socialism and considered rejecting his inheritance from the father he'd never known. He graduated Oxford with dreams of becoming an artist but when his beloved 'step-grandfather', ex-miner Billy Evans succumbed to TB Harry volunteered to accompany him to a sanatorium. There he met Diana, a beautiful, feminist medical student; and Mary, an illiterate, farmer's daughter fighting to keep her family together. Harry falls in love - suffers rejection - and finds out about life and the responsibility...

From the American Revolution through the Civil Rights movement, Americans have long mobilized against political, social, and economic privilege. Hierarchies based on inheritance, wealth, and political preferment were treated as obnoxious and a threat to democracy. Mass movements envisioned a new world supplanting dog-eat-dog capitalism. But over the last half-century that political will and cultural imagination have vanished. Why? The Age of Acquiescence seeks to solve that mystery.

A vivid and enlightening oral history of homelessness in the Las Vegas storm drains and the hard work of reentering mainstream society. Dark Days, Bright Nights is the follow-up to the best-selling Beneath the Neon and shares the harrowing stories of Sin City's most marginalized people, from bottoming out in homelessness to mending relationships with family and adjusting to jobs, housing, and sobriety.

In 2018, Emily Flitter received a tip that Morgan Stanley had fired a Black employee without cause. Flitter had been searching for a way to investigate the deep-rooted racism in the American financial industry, and that one tip lit the sparkplug for a three-year journey through the shocking yet normalized corruption in our financial institutions. Examining local insurance agencies and corporate titans like JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock, and Wells Fargo and reveals the practices that have kept the racial wealth gap practically as wide as it was during the Jim Crow era.