Rural Poverty

In one of the poorest parts of rural New Hampshire, teenage girls have been disappearing, snatched from back country roads, never to be seen alive again. For 17-year-old Marjorie Richards, the fear raised by these abductions is the backdrop to what she lives with in her own home, every day. Marjorie has been raised by parents so intentionally isolated from normal society that they have developed their own dialect, a kind of mountain hybrid of English that displays both their ignorance of and disdain for the wider world.

In this dark, southern noir, a writer drifting through life escapes his failed marriage and back to his family home in the Ozarks where he finds himself in the middle of a blood feud between his own family and the brutal Dolly clan. “My imagination is always skulking about in a wrong place.”...

The Chinese Economic miracle is happening despite, not because of, China's 900 million peasants. They are missing from the portraits of booming Shanghai, or Beijing. Many of China's underclass live under a feudalistic system unchanged since the 15th century. Wu Chuntao and Chen Guidi undertook a three-year survey of what had happened to the peasants in one of the poorest provinces, Anhui, asking the question: have the peasants been betrayed by the revolution undertaken in their name by Mao and his successors?

Charles D. Thompson, Jr., was born in Southwestern Virginia into an extended family of small farmers. Yet, as he came of age, he witnessed the demise of every farm in his family. Over the course of his own life of farming, rural education, organizing, and activism, the stories of his home place have been his constant inspiration, helping him identify with the losses of others and to fight against injustices. In Going Over Home, Thompson shares revelations and reflections, from cattle auctions with his grandfather to community gardens in the coal camps of Eastern Kentucky.

In the works for more than twenty years, Interstate 69 has been both eagerly anticipated as an economic godsend and the center of a firestorm of protests by local environmentalists, farmers, ranchers, anarchists, and others who question both the wisdom of building more highways and the merits of globalization. Part history, part travelogue, Interstate 69 chronicles the last great highway project in America, introducing the people who have worked tirelessly to build it or stop it from being built, and the many places it would change forever.