English Poverty

Eleven Minutes tells the story of Maria, a young girl from a Brazilian village whose first innocent brushes with love leave her heartbroken. At a tender age, she becomes convinced that she will never find true love, instead believing that “love is a terrible thing that will make you suffer.” A chance meeting in Rio takes her to Geneva, where she dreams of finding fame and fortune, yet ends up working as a prostitute.

Uwem Akpan's stunning stories humanize the perils of poverty and violence so piercingly that few listeners will feel they've ever encountered Africa so immediately. The eight-year-old narrator of "An Ex-Mas Feast" needs only enough money to buy books and pay fees in order to attend school. Even when his twelve-year-old sister takes to the streets to raise these meager funds, his dream can't be granted. Food comes first. His family lives in a street shanty in Nairobi, Kenya, but their way of both loving and taking advantage of each other strikes a universal chord.

In Separate and Unequal, historian Steven M. Gillon offers a revelatory new history of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders - popularly known as the Kerner Commission. Convened by President Lyndon Johnson after riots in Newark and Detroit left dozens dead and thousands injured, the commission issued a report in 1968 that attributed the unrest to "white racism" and called for aggressive new programs to end discrimination and poverty.

Marx started work on this book in January 1847, as can be judged from Engel's letter to Marx on January 15, 1847. By the beginning of April 1847, Marx's work was completed in the main and had gone to the press. On June 15, 1847, he wrote a short foreword. Published in Paris and Brussels in 1847, the book was not republished in full during Marx's lifetime. Excerpts from section five of Chapter Two appeared in different years, mostly between 1872-1875 in papers such as La Emancipacion, Der Volksstaat, Social-Demokrat, and others.

Twelve-year-old Zola thinks she has the perfect life. She thinks everyone does, now that it’s 2193, and humanity has solved all its problems. Insta-Closets deliver new clothes every morning, Insta-Ovens deliver gourmet meals on demand, and virtual reality goggles let her have any adventure she wants, with friends from all over the world. Then one day Zola finds a handwritten note in her Insta-Closet: If you want to see things as they really are, come find me. What if Zola’s wrong about everything—even the year?

Lou Montgomery has the voice of an angel, or so her mother tells her and anyone else who will listen. But Lou can only hear the fear in her own voice. She's never liked crowds or loud noises or even high fives; in fact, she's terrified of them, which makes her pretty sure there's something wrong with her. When Lou crashes their pickup on a dark and snowy road, child services separate the mother-daughter duo. Now she has to start all over again at a fancy private school far away from anything she's ever known.

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".

Paul Polak, whose organization International Development Enterprises (IDE) has directly helped over 17 million people get out of poverty permanently, exposes the top 3 things we are doing wrong in our efforts to end the root causes of poverty. He then, through the story of a Nepali farmer, goes on to detail solutions for what actually works when it comes to ending poverty.

Les Miserables is set in the Parisian underworld. The protagonist, Jean Valjean, is sentenced to prison for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread. After his release, Valjean plans to rob monseigneur Myriel, a saint-like bishop, but cancels his plan. However, he forfeits his parole by committing a minor crime, and for this crime Valjean is haunted by the police inspector Javert. Valjean eventually reforms and becomes a successful businessman, benefactor, and mayor of a northern town.

From New York Times best-selling authors Laura Schroff and Alex Tresniowski comes the young listeners' edition of an unbelievable memoir about an unlikely friendship that forever changed the lives of a busy sales executive and a hungry 11-year-old boy. On one rainy afternoon, on a crowded New York City street corner, eleven-year-old Maurice met Laura. Maurice asked Laura for spare change because he was hungry, and something made Laura stop and ask Maurice if she could take him to lunch.

Thousands of people live in the subway, railroad, and sewage tunnels that form the bowels of New York City. This audiobook is about them, the so-called mole people, living alone and in communities, in subway tunnels, and below subway platforms. It is about how and why people move underground, who they are, and what they have to say about their lives and the "topside" world they've left behind.

A riveting work of literary journalism that explores the infamous police killing of Eric Garner - from the New York Times best-selling author of The Divide.

Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, politics, health, and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor. In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America.

"I saw his face." Deborah Hall's words launched the destiny of two men from very different worlds. Ron Hall was an international art dealer with upscale tastes; Denver Moore was a homeless drifter with a dangerous past. Millions have read about their unlikely bond through their first book, Same Kind of Different as Me - a New York Times best seller and now a major motion picture.

Written in vivid prose, On Fire For God is a stirring and urgent examination of the far-reaching emotional, political, and sociological effects of the Christian Right. With unflinching honesty, exvaneglical journalist Josiah Hesse shares his personal journey from the stifling working class town of Mason City, Iowa, through the institutions of the Christian right: a toxic mixture of schools, ministries, and Christian camps that taught creationism, foretold horrific stories of the rapture, instilled sexual shame, and fearmongered followers into believing ceaseless agony was awaiting sinners.

The world food system is in crisis. Right now, just over one billion people in the world live in extreme poverty. Food shortages are not limited to third world countries and crops. Maybe genetic modification of food might solve the problem. Some people think this is the be-all and the end-all and cite this as a perfect solution for food shortages. This book takes a look at the economic crisis with special attention to the world food system.

Tana lives in a world where walled cities called Coldtowns exist. In them, quarantined monsters and humans mingle. But once you pass through Coldtown's gates, you can never leave. One morning, after a perfectly ordinary party, Tana wakes up surrounded by corpses. The only other survivors are her exasperatingly endearing ex-boyfriend, infected and on the edge, and a mysterious boy burdened with a terrible secret. Shaken and determined, Tana enters a race against the clock to save the three of them by going straight to Coldtown's opulent heart.

In the summer of 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the South. Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration and a watershed literary event when Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was first published in 1941 to enormous critical acclaim. This unsparing record of place, the people who shaped the land, and the rhythm of their lives is intensely moving and unrelentingly honest, and today, it stands as a poetic tract of its time.

Over the last two decades, America has been falling deeper and deeper into a statistical mystery: Poverty goes up. Crime goes down. The prison population doubles. Fraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world’s wealth. The rich get massively richer. No one goes to jail. In search of a solution, journalist Matt Taibbi discovered the Divide, the seam in American life where our two most troubling trends—growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration—come together, driven by a dramatic shift in American citizenship: Our basic rights are now determined by our wealth or poverty.

Why is it that some people work hard, yet remain poor? How is it that others seem to rise out of poverty and become affluent in a short span of time? The answers are in this little book, which everyone should listen to at some point in their life. If they did, they would know how to become rich relatively quickly. If not, they might spend years working back-breakingly hard, without ever breaking even. That’s how powerful the principles contained in this book are.