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Author
Language
English
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Description
"Mike Muñoz is a young Mexican American not too many years out of high school--and just fired from his latest gig as a lawn boy on a landscaping crew. Though he tries time and again to get his foot on the first rung of that ladder to success, he can't seem to get a break. But then things start to change for Mike, and after a raucous, jarring, and challenging trip, he finds he can finally see the future and his place in it"--
Author
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh "Shuggie" Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher's war on heavy industry has put husbands and sons out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for his artistic brother and practical sister. She dreams of...
3) Empire Falls
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.4 - AR Pts: 34
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
With Empire Falls Richard Russo cements his reputation as one of America's most compelling and compassionate storytellers. Miles Roby has been slinging burgers at the Empire Grill for 20 years, a job that cost him his college education and much of his self-respect. What keeps him there? It could be his bright, sensitive daughter Tick, who needs all his help surviving the local high school. Or maybe it's Janine, Miles' soon-to-be ex-wife, who's taken...
Author
Series
Maisie Dobbs novels volume 9
Language
English
Description
When Eddie Pettit's death is ruled an accident by the police, many believe that this gentle soul was murdered and Maisy Dobbs, determined to do right by Eddie, searches for the truth amid the working-class of Lambeth.
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
Nancy Isenberg upends assumptions about America's supposedly class-free society. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ's Great Society....
Author
Language
English
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Description
"In the 1950s, Ellie and Brick are teenagers in love. A basketball star, Brick could escape his abusive father and be the first person in his working-class family to go to college. But when Ellie becomes pregnant, they marry, she gives up her dream of nursing school, and Brick gets a union card instead. This riveting novel tells the story of three generations in a working-class family; especially Brick and Ellie's daughter Samantha. Illuminating issues...
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
Evicted meets Nickel and Dimed in Stephanie Land's memoir about working as a maid, a beautiful and gritty exploration of poverty in America. Includes a foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich. At 28, Stephanie Land's plans of breaking free from the roots of her hometown in the Pacific Northwest to chase her dreams of attending a university and becoming a writer, were cut short when a summer fling turned into an unexpected pregnancy. She turned to housekeeping...
Author
Publisher
Ballantine
Pub. Date
1985
Language
English
Description
Studs Turkel records the voices of America. Men and women from every walk of life talk to him, telling him of their likes and dislikes, fears, problems, and happinesses on the job. Once again, Turkel has created a rich and unique document that is as simple as conversation, but as subtle and heartfelt as the meaning of our lives.
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"A profound and provocative examination of America in crisis, where unemployment, deindustrialization, and a bitter hopelessness and malaise have resulted in an epidemic of diseases of despair--drug abuse, gambling, suicide, magical thinking, xenophobia, and a culture of sadism and hate. America, says Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Chris Hedges, is convulsed by an array of pathologies that have arisen out of profound hopelessness, a bitter despair...
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"Douglas Stuart's first novel Shuggie Bain is one of the most successful literary debuts of the century so far. It was awarded the 2020 Booker Prize, and is now published or forthcoming in forty territories, having already sold more than a million copies worldwide. Now Stuart returns with Young Mungo, his extraordinary second novel. Five years in the writing, it is both a page-turner and literary tour de force, a vivid portrayal of working-class life...
Author
Publisher
Penguin Books
Pub. Date
2015.
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Sensational, engrossing, and heartbreaking, The Mysteries of Paris is doubtless one of the most entertaining and influential works to emerge from the nineteenth century. It was one of Frances first serial novels, and for sixteen months, Parisians rushed in droves to the newsstands each week for the latest installment. Eug�ene Sues intricate melodrama unfolds around a Paris where, despite the gulf between them, the fortunes of the rich and poor are...
Publisher
University Press of Kentucky
Pub. Date
[2023]
Language
English
Description
"By 1968, most Americans felt that the War on Poverty had been lost, cast out to the shadows of the Vietnam War. That same year, the Poor People's Campaign marched on Washington in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination, motivated by King's desirefor economic justice. The campaign was a multiracial effort that aimed to alleviate poverty for African Americans, white Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Indigenous people. In 2017,...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.4 - AR Pts: 20
Language
English
Description
In a critically acclaimed memoir, a correspondent for The New York Times recounts growing up in the Alabama hill country, the son of a violent veteran and a mother who tried to insulate her children from the poverty and ignorance of life.
This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills...
Author
Language
English
Description
In 1912, rational Fred Fairly, one of Cambridge's best and brightest, crashes his bike and wakes up in bed with a stranger--fellow casualty Daisy Saunders, a charming, pretty, generous working-class nurse. So begins a series of complications--not only of the heart but also of the head--as Fred and Daisy take up each other's education and turn each other's philosophies upside down.
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
Shares the story of the author's family and upbringing, describing how they moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan that included the author, a Yale Law School graduate, while navigating the demands of middle class life and the collective demons of the past.
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"After sixteen novels, Jacqueline Winspear has taken the bold step of turning to memoir, revealing the hardships and joys of her family history. Both shockingly frank and deftly restrained, her memoir tackles such difficult, poignant, and fascinating family memories as her paternal grandfather's shellshock, her mother's evacuation from London during the Blitz; her soft-spoken animal-loving father's torturous assignment to an explosives team during...
Author
Publisher
Vintage International
Pub. Date
2010.
Language
English
Description
"A rousing and uproarious novel of the life, loves, and misadventures of a working-class rogue, Saturday Night/Sunday Morning marked the arrival of one of the most cherished authors in the twenty-first century. At twenty-two years of age, Arthur Seaton is a hard-drinking lathe operator in a bicycle factory. Sharp, rowdy, and attractive, he is a lover of life in the raw, and his enormous vitality comes pouring through, at a family party, at the county...
Author
Publisher
Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company
Pub. Date
[2023]
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
An award-winning historian shows how the experiences of the Black working class, from the earliest days of the republic to the essential worker of the Covid pandemic, is essential to a full understanding of the American story.
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