Social Class

Harry Crews grew up as the son of a sharecropper in Georgia at a time when “the rest of the country was just beginning to feel the real hurt of the Great Depression but it had been living in Bacon County for years.” Yet what he conveys in this moving, brutal autobiography of his first six years of life is an elegiac sense of community and roots from a rural South that had rarely been represented in this way.

The widening wealth gap is all too familiar to many Millennials and GenZers, especially when home ownership and the lack of debt seem like faraway fantasies. And it's no surprise when they only hold about 4.6% of the country's wealth while Boomers held 22% at around the same age. So what happened to the promise of the American Dream? In this entry of his celebrated Hidden History series, Thom Hartmann uncovers the rise of the American middle class through the progressive policies of FDR, through to its downfall with the increasing privatization and economic deregulations of the Reagan era.

In the tradition of Matthew Desmond’s Evicted and Andrea Elliot’s Invisible Child, Disposable is a poignant exploration of America’s underclass, left vulnerable by systemic racism and capitalism. Here, Sarah Jones delves into the lives of the essential workers, seniors, and people with disabilities who were disproportionately affected by COVID-19—not due to their age or profession, but because of the systemic inequality and poverty that left them exposed.

A new book from the award-winning teacher and best-selling author, Ron Clark, providing rules for parents and teachers to help kids succeed in school.

Why are certain people so incredibly great at what they do? Most of us think we know the answer - but we’re almost always wrong. That’s important, because if we’re wrong on this crucial question, then we have zero chance of getting significantly better at anything we care about. Happily, the real source of great performance is no longer a mystery. Bringing together extensive scientific research, best-selling author Geoff Colvin shows where we go wrong and what actually makes world-class performers so remarkable.

As Reeves shows, the growing separation between the upper middle class and everyone else can be seen in family structure, neighborhoods, attitudes, and lifestyle. Those at the top of the income ladder are becoming more effective at passing on their status to their children, reducing overall social mobility. The result is not just an economic divide but a fracturing of American society along class lines. Upper-middle-class children become upper-middle-class adults.

Yanis Varoufakis has appeared before heads of nations, assemblies of experts, and countless students around the world. Now, he faces his most important - and difficult - audience yet. Using clear language and vivid examples, Varoufakis offers a series of letters to his young daughter about the economy: how it operates, where it came from, how it benefits some while impoverishing others. Taking bankers and politicians to task, he explains the historical origins of inequality among and within nations, questions the pervasive notion that everything has its price, and shows why economic instability is a chronic risk.

“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” This phrase, arguably Thomas Edison’s most famous quote, has been drilled into the minds of generations of Americans. A fairly straightforward iteration of the idea that innovation, discovery, and ingenuity are the result of drive and grit above all, it has also come to represent much darker myths: that hard work always leads to success and that achievement is the product of individuals and not communities.

The United States spends enormous sums on helping people—$3.8 trillion on healthcare, $182 billion on prisons, and $604 billion on higher education—and yet these systems routinely fail us. When we seek to improve how they function, our efforts focus on policy debates, technical solutions, funding, and data. But if these systems are to truly improve, we have to start with the human values behind them. Broken explores the deeply human dimensions we must consider if we want to rebuild the policies, technologies, processes, and most importantly, the heart we use to serve people.

Villains of All Nations explores the "Golden Age" of Atlantic piracy (1716-1726) and the infamous generation whose images underlie our modern, romanticized view of pirates.

From the bestselling and critically acclaimed author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace comes “an eye-opening, fully humanizing, deeply affecting look at the often-misunderstood juvenile justice system and its inhabitants—young people of earnestness, disappointment, hope, and resilience” (Booklist, starred review).

Freed Black women organizing for protection in the Reconstruction-era South. Jewish immigrant garment workers braving deadly conditions for a sliver of independence. Asian American fieldworkers rejecting government-sanctioned indentured servitude across the Pacific. Incarcerated workers advocating for basic human rights and fair wages. The queer Black labor leader who helped orchestrate America’s civil rights movement. These are only some of the heroes who propelled American labor’s relentless push for fairness and equal protection under the law.

We live in an era of soaring corporate profits and anemic wage gains, one in which low-paid jobs and blighted blue-collar communities have become a common feature of our nation’s landscape. Behind these trends lies a little-discussed problem: the decades-long decline in worker power. Award-winning journalist and author Steven Greenhouse guides us through the key episodes and trends in history that are essential to understanding some of our nation’s most pressing problems.

The national best seller that defines a new economic class and shows how it is key to the future of our cities. The Rise of the Creative Class gives us a provocative new way to think about why we live as we do today - and where we might be headed. Weaving storytelling with masses of new and updated research, Richard Florida traces the fundamental theme that runs through a host of seemingly unrelated changes in American society: the growing role of creativity in our economy.

For much of his life, Esau McCaulley was taught to see himself as an exception: someone who, through hard work, faith, and determination, overcame childhood poverty, anti-Black racism, and an absent father to earn a job as a university professor and a life in the middle class.

For all the attempts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, we've ignored what economic and cultural loss can do to pride. What happens, Arlie Russell Hochschild asks, when a proud people in a hard-hit region suffer the deep loss of pride and are confronted with a powerful political appeal that makes it feel "stolen"? Hochschild's research drew her to Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia, within the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the nation.

As a clairaudient and angelic channel with over 30 years of experience, Linda West is a best-selling author and expert in the science of frequencies, manifesting, and the law of attraction. In her latest audiobook, she helps lovers of “the secret” to actually use the science of the law of attraction. It is full of real magic and real secrets, and you will get the practical and simple steps for using the law of attraction.

In this revolutionary exposé, Harvard Law School bankruptcy expert Elizabeth Warren and financial consultant Amelia Tyagi show that today's middle-class parents are increasingly trapped by financial meltdowns. Astonishingly, sending mothers to work has made families more vulnerable to financial disaster than ever before. Today's two-income family earns 75% more money than its single-income counterpart of a generation ago, but has 25% less discretionary income to cover living costs.

The media can't stop talking about the gridlock in Washington, as if a handful of stubborn Republicans are the only thing standing between us and a fully-functional democracy. The reality is that our government was taken over by big business and their allies in both political parties. The getaway driver in this heist was corporate media. The good news is that the American people are very progressive. And soon progressives will take over Washington as well! And when they do, the great majority of Americans will love it.

It may be taboo to say, but some groups in America do better than others. Mormons have recently risen to astonishing business success. Cubans in Miami climbed from poverty to prosperity in a generation. Nigerians earn doctorates at stunningly high rates. Indian and Chinese Americans have much higher incomes than other Americans; Jews may have the highest of all. Why do some groups rise? Drawing on groundbreaking original research and startling statistics, The Triple Package uncovers the secret to their success.