Working Class

Bernie Sanders: Hero is a gripping political biography that chronicles the remarkable life and enduring legacy of America’s most consistent political outsider. From his early days protesting segregation in Chicago to his transformative presidential campaigns that redefined progressive politics, this definitive biography follows Sanders’ lifelong fight against corporate greed, economic inequality, and political corruption. This book reveals how Sanders built a movement from the margins—eschewing corporate PACs, confronting billionaires, and refusing to sell out. Readers follow his rise...

There's a college affordability crisis happening in the US right now. Tuition rates have soared, while increases in blue collar wages have slowed to a crawl. This adds up to a painful realization for lower-income young people desperately hoping to go to college: there's no way to pay for it. Bobbi Dempsey shares her brutally honest first-person account of the struggle to pay for her children's and her own education on a working-class salary.

Liverpool, 1935: Raised in a strict Catholic family, Viv Byrne knows what’s expected of her: marry a Catholic man from her working-class neighborhood and have his children. However, when she finds herself pregnant after a fling with Joshua Levinson, a Jewish man with dreams of becoming a famous jazz musician, Viv knows that a swift wedding is the only answer. Her only solace is that marrying Joshua will mean escaping her strict mother’s scrutiny. But when Joshua makes a life-changing choice on their wedding day, Viv is forced once again into the arms of her disapproving family.

"Bridges We Build" takes readers into the heart of Watertown, New York, during the darkest days of the Great Depression. Through the eyes of Maggie O'Connor, a resilient housewife, the novel explores the intertwining lives of working-class families, small business owners, and local leaders as they struggle to survive—and ultimately rebuild—amidst economic collapse. From factory layoffs to neighborhood food drives, Maggie becomes the emotional anchor of her community, finding strength in resourcefulness and solidarity. As her husband Jim grapples with the shame of losing his job and ...

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.

It’s a life too big and a story too extraordinary for just one book. Jimmy Barnes has lived many lives—from Glaswegian migrant kid to iconic front man, from solo superstar to proud father of his own musical clan. In this hugely anticipated sequel to his critically acclaimed best seller Working Class Boy, Jimmy picks up the story of his life as he leaves Adelaide in the back of an old truck with a then unknown band called Cold Chisel.

Raw, gritty, compassionate, surprising and darkly funny - Australian legend Jimmy Barnes' unforgettable childhood memoir. A household name, an Australian rock icon, the elder statesman of OzPubRock - there isn't an accolade or cliché that doesn't apply to Jimmy Barnes. But long before Cold Chisel and Barnesy, long before the tall tales of success and excess, there was the true story of James Dixon Swan - a working class boy whose family made the journey from Scotland to Australia in search of a better life.

Jack Myers' fictionalized memoir explores the dynamics of being raised in a declining Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood. Pint-sized and four-eyed, little Jimmy Morris is near the bottom of the food chain in his working class "streetcar suburb" of Kings Cross. He's a dreamer, schemer, schoolyard scrapper, secret lover of books, and classroom clown . . . a kid you can't decide whether to hug or to slap. Meanwhile, the conformity of the 1950s is yielding to those turbulent '60s. Yes, the times they definitely were a changin' ó with Kings Cross in the eye of the societal storm. America's ...

This remarkable account has had an enduring influence on social and economic studies and has remained in print since its first English publication in 1885. It was written, in German, by a youthful Friedrich Engels, the son of a German industrialist, who was already concerned - even angered - by the conditions he saw inflicted on the working classes as the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum. His first visit to England (1842-44) and what he saw there with his own eyes fuelled his concerns and prompted him to make this formal study.

“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.

Chicken Liver Blues is an inimitable collection of twelve stories that at times barrels and swerves down rural backroads kicking up gravel and dust in its wake, and other moments it’s a calm late-night country cruise that soaks up the stars, the moon, and the heavens while contemplating the meaning of life. In TWENTY DOLLARS, a working-class man whose marriage is on the brink of unraveling is convinced to go out for another night of drinking, but this time his night out with the guys changes his life in more ways than one. BLUESMAN OF THE WOODS involves a young guitar rambler and his ...

Nobody who works hard should be poor in America, writes Pulitzer Prize-winner David Shipler. Clear-headed, rigorous, and compassionate, he journeys deeply into the lives of individual store clerks and factory workers, farm laborers and sweat-shop seamstresses, illegal immigrants in menial jobs and Americans saddled with immense student loans and paltry wages. They are known as the working poor.

Jen Dixon is not your typical Kansas City kindergarten class mom - or mom in general. Jen already has two college-age daughters by two different (probably) musicians, and it's her second time around the class mom block with five-year-old Max - this time with a husband and father by her side. Though her best friend and PTA president sees her as the "wisest" candidate for the job (or oldest), not all of the other parents agree.

A century ago, it was a given that a woman with a college degree had to choose between having a career and a family. Today, there are more female college graduates than ever before, and more women want to have a career and family, yet challenges persist at work and at home. This book traces how generations of women have responded to the problem of balancing career and family as the twentieth century experienced a sea change in gender equality, revealing why true equity for dual career couples remains frustratingly out of reach.

Balancing nostalgia, fresh perspectives and introspection, Never begins with family and unconventional upbringings; journeys through the tumultuous and glamorous world of pop; and takes pause for self-reflection. Never goes beyond the blinding lights of the stage – giving an intimate look at the man behind the hits – and is a portrait of truth, artistic evolution and the astounding power of contentment.

Heiress Leah Sinclair is finally out from under the watch of her overprotective parents, and she’s ready to let loose and enter a new era — one filled with travel, exploration, adventure, and most of all… men. And what better options are there than charity auction where she can win a date with a sexy alien? Aano and Yahn is working a complex operation when things go sideways, and when they stumble upon a charity date auction, they figure it’s the perfect place to hide. And when Leah, a willing, slightly ditzy heiress offers them a tour of her ship, they see the perfect opportunity ...

Marry me. That’s what my brother’s best friend—Logan Beckett, an ex-Marine—says to me in the cereal aisle. Logan needs a wife to boost his veteran housing benefits . I’m jobless, drowning in medical debt, and one asthma attack away from disaster. I need health insurance and a lifeline. One year. No feelings. Separate beds. What could go wrong? Everything—because Logan Beckett has never felt like a business arrangement. Not when he looks at me like I’m his mission. Not when he tries to protect me. And definitely not when he kisses me after our courthouse vows like he means it. ...

Many black strategies of daily resistance have been obscured—until now. Race rebels, argues Kelley, have created strategies of resistance, movements, and entire subcultures. Here, for the first time, everyday race rebels are given the historiographical attention they deserve, from the Jim Crow era to the present.

Seraphine Mayes and her twin brother, Danny, were born in the middle of summer at their family's estate on the Norfolk coast. Within hours of their birth, their mother threw herself from the cliffs, the au pair fled, and the village thrilled with whispers of dark cloaks, changelings, and the aloof couple who drew a young nanny into their inner circle.

Christophe Guilluy, a French geographer, makes the case that France has become an "American society" - one that is both increasingly multicultural and increasingly unequal. The divide between the global economy's winners and losers in today's France has replaced the old left-right split, leaving many on "the periphery".