Social Poverty

When Breezy, as she came to call herself, hit the streets of Chicago as a prostitute in 1973 she was barely a teenager. But she was pretty and funny as hell, and determined to support her daughters and make a living. For the next 25 years, she moved across the country, finding new pimps, parties, drugs, and endless, profound heartache. And she also — astonishingly — managed to find the strength to break from a brutal world and not only save herself but save future Breezys.

As former staffer to Robert F. Kennedy and current Georgetown law professor Peter Edelman explains in Not a Crime to Be Poor, Ferguson is everywhere in America today. Through money bail systems, fees and fines, strictly enforced laws and regulations against behavior including trespassing and public urination that largely affect the homeless, and the substitution of prisons and jails for the mental hospitals that have traditionally served the impoverished, in one of the richest countries on Earth we have effectively made it a crime to be poor.

Popular author Sarah Dooley offers this tale in which a 12-year-old girl loses everything. Ember’s family’s trailer has been burned to the ground. Now, with the school year about to start, Ember’s family has no money and no place to live. Ember knows she needs to make a fresh start - but with all that’s happened, is this even possible?

As a street chaplain, activist, and cofounder of Open Table Nashville, Lindsey Krinks takes us on an unforgettable spiritual journey to tent cities, alleys, slums, and the front lines of movements for justice. Praying with Our Feet challenges preconceptions about people who live on the streets, calling us to move from charity to justice and to get our hands dirty in the struggle for a better world.

In Districts That Succeed, long-time education writer Karin Chenoweth turns her attention from effective schools to effective districts. Leveraging new, cutting-edge national research on district performance as well as in-depth reporting, Chenoweth profiles five districts that have successfully broken the correlation between race, poverty, and achievement.

An eye-opening examination of how treating land as a source of profit has a massive impact on racial inequality and the housing, gentrification, and environmental crises.

Giselle Burgess was a young mother of five trying to provide for her family. Though she had a full-time job, the demands of ever-increasing rent and mounting bills forced her to fall behind, and eviction soon followed. Giselle and her kids were thrown into New York City's overburdened shelter system, which housed nearly 60,000 people each day. They soon found themselves living at a Sleep Inn in Queens, provided by the city as temporary shelter; for nearly a year, all six lived in a single room with two beds and one bathroom.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dale Maharidge has spent his career documenting the downward spiral of the American working class, and his new book explores the limits of the American dream in the 2020s. Poverty is both reality and destiny for increasing numbers of people in the 2020s and, as Maharidge discovers spray-painted inside an abandoned gas station in the California desert, it is a fate often handed down from birth.

Twelve-year-old Lowen Grover is still reeling from the shooting death of his best friend, Abe, when he stumbles across an article about a small town giving away homes for just one dollar. It seems like the perfect escape from Flintlock and all of the awful memories associated with the city - and to his surprise, his mum, dad, and older brother are all onboard. Only his sister, Anneth, is reluctant to leave her friends and the familiarity (and amenities!) of Flintlock, but with the rest of the family anxious to do what’s best for grief-stricken Lowen, her protests fall on deaf ears. But is the Dollar Program too good to be true?

For more than 30 years, humankind has known how to grow enough food to end chronic hunger worldwide. Yet while the Green Revolution succeeded in South America and Asia, it never got to Africa. More than 9 million people every year die of hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases every yearmost of them in Africa and most of them children. More die of hunger in Africa than from AIDS and malaria combined. Now, an impending global food crisis threatens to make things worse.

Few topics have as many myths, stereotypes, and misperceptions surrounding them as that of poverty in America. The poor have been badly misunderstood since the beginnings of the country, with the rhetoric only ratcheting up in recent times. Our current era of fake news, alternative facts, and media partisanship has led to a breeding ground for all types of myths and misinformation to gain traction and legitimacy. Poorly Understood is the first book to systematically address and confront many of the most widespread myths pertaining to poverty.

In this compelling new book, relying on original reporting from the most dangerous corners of Rio to the halls of power in Washington, DC, Dave Zirin examines how sports and politics are colliding in remarkable fashion in Brazil, opening up an international conversation on the culture, economics, and politics of sports.

Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times called him "one of the unsung heroes of modern times." Fazle Hasan Abed was a mild-mannered accountant who may be the most influential man most people have never even heard of. A former finance executive with almost no experience in relief aid, he founded BRAC, originally the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee, in 1972, aiming to help a few thousand war refugees. A half century later, BRAC is by many measures the largest nongovernmental organization in the world-and by many accounts, the most effective anti-poverty program ever.

An autobiographical study, Down and Out in Paris and London follows Orwell as he tramps around both Paris and London. Pawning his belongings to buy food, unemployment, drinking heavily and jostling for a place in homeless hostels are but a few of the experiences related with candour and insight in this unabridged exclusive audiobook. Orwell was arguably one of the first 'gonzo' journalists.

Humans are, in in fundamental ways, a migratory species, more so than any other land mammal. Migration is one of the most toxically controversial subjects of our day, but it is not only an issue of our age. Migrants are expected to assimilate and encouraged to remain distinctive; to defend their heritage and adopt a new one. They are sub-human and super-human; romanticised and castigated, admired and abhorred. Migrants tells us that this is not a new narrative; this is the history of migration, which is part of everybody's backstory.

The Man in the Dog Park offers the listener a rare window into homeless life. Spurred by a personal relationship with a homeless man who became her coauthor, Cathy A. Small takes a compelling look at what it means and what it takes to be homeless. Interviews and encounters with dozens of homeless people lead us into a world that most have never seen. We travel as an intimate observer into the places that many homeless frequent, including a community shelter, a day-labor agency, a panhandling corner, a pawn shop, and a HUD housing office.

From poverty and policing, homelessness and overrun prisons to Grenfell and hostile environments, Britain has long been failing those who need our help the most. There is arguably one unifying theme that links all these afflictions: proximity. Proximity is how close we are to the action and how that affects how we assess, relate to and address whatever that action happens to be. Almost every job requires a level of experience and training with the notable exception of the most powerful people in the country—our political class.

Blighted is a powerful narrative about the decades-long decay and remarkable two-year reinvention of Summerdale, an aging apartment community located in one of Atlanta's grittiest corridors. Blighted unfolds in the voices of ruthless drug dealers, phantom tenants, fearless landlords, the working poor, educators, and visionary local leaders.

In Delta Epiphany: Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi, Ellen B. Meacham tells the story of Kennedy's visit to the Mississippi Delta, while also examining the forces of history, economics, and politics that shaped the lives of the children he met in Mississippi in 1967 and the decades that followed.

Some choose to "get off the grid", but many more Americans find themselves pushed off - whether because of financial pressures, a need or a deep desire to disappear for a period of time, or myriad other compelling reasons. John Casper is serious about teaching the listener how storage units can meet the needs of the housing-insecure, the adventurous, and anyone else willing to challenge social norms (and sometimes the law) in search of a place to call home.