Social Poverty

A smart, provocative look at how the American dream of single-family homes, white picket fences, and two-car garages became a lonely, overpriced nightmare, and how new trends in housing can help us live better.

Shif has a happy life, unfamiliar with the horrors of his country's regime. He is one of the smartest boys in school, and feels safe and loved in the home he shares with his mother and little sister, right next door to his best friend. But the day that soldiers arrive at his door, Shif knows that he will never be safe again - his only choice is to run. Facing both unthinkable cruelty and boundless kindness, Shif bravely makes his way towards a future he can barely imagine. Refugee 87 is a story of friendship, kindness, hardship, survival, and - above all - hope.

In his previous book, The Elusive Quest for Growth, William Easterly criticized the utter ineffectiveness of Western organizations to mitigate global poverty, and he was promptly fired by his then-employer, the World Bank. The White Man's Burden is his widely anticipated counterpunch - a brilliant and blistering indictment of the West's economic policies for the world's poor.

For more than three decades, Jeffrey D. Sachs has been at the forefront of international economic problem solving. But Sachs turns his attention back home in The Price of Civilization, a book that is essential reading for every American. In a forceful, impassioned, and personal voice, he offers not only a searing and incisive diagnosis of our country’s economic ills but also an urgent call for Americans to restore the virtues of fairness, honesty, and foresight as the foundations of national prosperity.

Progress and Poverty by Henry George explores the paradox of increasing inequality in periods of economic growth. George proposes that land speculation is the root cause of wealth disparities, advocating for a single tax on land value to promote fairness and reduce poverty. This influential work is critical for understanding economic and social theories regarding land reform and taxation.

What secrets do the Las Vegas storm drains keep? What discoveries wait in the dark? What's beneath the neon? Armed with a flashlight, tape recorder, and expandable baton, Las Vegas CityLife writer-editor Matthew O'Brien explored the Las Vegas flood-control system for more than four years. Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas chronicles O'Brien's adventures in subterranean Vegas. He follows the footsteps of a psycho killer. He braces against a flood. He parties with naked crack-heads.

"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.

Widely acclaimed writer Chris Arnade shines new light on America's poor, drug-addicted, and forgotten - both urban and rural, blue state and red state - and indicts the elitists who've left them behind. Like Jacob Riis in the 1890s, Walker Evans in the 1930s, or Michael Harrington in the 1960s, Chris Arnade bares the reality of our current class divide in unforgettable true stories. Arnade's raw, deeply reported accounts cut through today's clickbait media headlines and indict the elitists who misunderstood poverty and addiction in America for decades.

Part social reportage, part socialist polemic, The Road to Wigan Pier sets out a hellish vision of a broken Britain before delivering a meditation on how we can create a more egalitarian society. Having travelled to the industrial north of England on assignment from his editor, Orwell's confronting, stark descriptions of the social injustice, cramped slum housing, squalor, hunger and growing unemployment he encounters are written with unblinking honesty, anger and humanity.

The last acceptable form of prejudice in America is based on class and executed through state-sponsored economic discrimination. While the American meritocracy officially denounces prejudice based on race and gender, it has spawned a new form of bias against those with less education and income. Millions of working-class Americans have their opportunity blocked by exclusionary snob zoning. These government policies make housing unaffordable, frustrate the goals of the civil rights movement, and lock in inequality in our urban and suburban landscapes.

This audiobook provides social workers, outreach clinicians, case managers, and concerned community members with a pretreatment guide for assisting homeless couples, youth, and single adults. Chapters explore policy and research accompanied by narratives that trace a person's journey from homelessness to housing and beyond. The interrelationship between Homeless Outreach and Housing First is examined in detail to inform program development and hands-on practice.

Piven and Cloward have updated their classic work on the history and function of welfare to cover the American welfare state's massive erosion during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years. The authors present a boldly comprehensive, brilliant new theory to explain the comparative underdevelopment of the US welfare state among advanced industrial nations. Their conceptual framework promises to shape the debate within current and future administrations as they attempt to rethink the welfare system and its role in American society.

Jeanne Ann is smart, stubborn, living in an orange van, and determined to find a permanent address before the start of seventh grade. Cal is awkward, sensitive, living in a humongous house across the street, and determined to save her. Jeanne Ann is roughly as enthusiastic about his help as she is about living in a van. As the two form a tentative friendship that grows deeper over alternating chapters, they're buoyed by a cast of complex, oddball characters who let them down, lift them up, and leave you cheering.

On a frosty morning sometime in the 14th century, in a village somewhere in England, a girl known only as Brat was sleeping in a dung heap. "You, girl. Are you alive or dead?" When she opened her eyes, she saw an important-looking woman with a sharp glance and a sharp nose and a wimple starched into sharp pleats. This woman was Jane the midwife, and she needed a helper....

In the underground tunnels below Grand Central Terminal, Lee Stringer - homeless and drug-addicted for 11 years - found a pencil to run through his crack pipe. One day he used it to write. Soon writing became a habit that won out over drugs, and before long Stringer had created one of the most powerful urban memoirs of our time. With humane wisdom and a biting wit, Stringer chronicles the unraveling of his seemingly secure existence as a marketing executive and his odyssey of survival on the streets of New York.

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.

This landmark treatise by the great economist Henry George was first published in 1879. George's work became the seminal analysis of the political economy which inspired most, if not all, the prominent thinkers of the Progressive Movement and many others of great influence: Upton Sinclair, John Dewey, George Bernard Shaw, Friedrich Hayek, H. G. Wells, Clarence Darrow, and Leo Tolstoy, to name but a few. His analyses and proposals are referred to as "Georgism".

Jeffrey Sachs - celebrated economist, special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, and author of the influential best seller The End of Poverty - disagrees. In his view, poverty is a problem that can be solved. With single-minded determination he has attempted to put into practice his theories about ending extreme poverty, to prove that the world's most destitute people can be lifted onto "the ladder of development."

Max Einstein is not your typical genius. She hacks the computer system at NYU to attend classes, builds inventions to help the homeless, and talks to Albert Einstein! (Okay, that's just in her imagination). But everything changes when Max is recruited by a mysterious organization! Their mission: solve some of the world's toughest problems using science. She's helped by a diverse group of young geniuses from around the globe as they invent new ways to power the farthest reaches of the planet. But that's only if the sinister outfit known only as The Corporation doesn't get to her first.

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.