Catalog Search Results
Author
Pub. Date
2016
Language
English
Formats
Description
The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement. They were alternately known as "waste people," "offals," "rubbish," "lazy lubbers," and "crackers." By the 1850s, the downtrodden included so-called "clay eaters" and "sandhillers," known for prematurely-aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and listless minds. Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Black History Month
NYT - Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction
NYT - Paperback Nonfiction
Women's History Month: Non Fiction
NYT - Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction
NYT - Paperback Nonfiction
Women's History Month: Non Fiction
Description
"As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not. In this book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, this book is a probing look at the struggles of America's white working class through the author's own story of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town. Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis -- that of poor, white Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for over forty years, has been reported with growing frequency...
Author
Pub. Date
2020
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
"Orphans Gig and Rye Dolan don't have a penny to their names. The brothers work grueling, odd jobs each day just to secure a meal, and spend nights sleeping wherever they can with other day laborers. Twenty-three-year-old Gig is a passionate union man, fighting for fair pay and calling out the corrupt employers who exploit the working class. Eager to emulate his older brother, Rye follows suit, though he can't quite muster Gig's passion for the cause....
Author
Publisher
Basic Books
Pub. Date
2017
Language
English
Formats
Description
"From a prize-winning historian, a new portrait of an extraordinary activist and the turbulent age in which she lived Goddess of Anarchy recounts the formidable life of the militant writer, orator, and agitator Lucy Parsons. Born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851 and raised in Texas-where she met her husband, the Haymarket "martyr" Albert Parsons-Lucy was a fearless advocate of First Amendment rights, a champion of the working classes, and...
Author
Pub. Date
2018
Language
English
Formats
Description
Twenty years after being banished from Winthrop Island, Miranda Schuyler returns to find justice for the man she once loved.
Summer, 1951. Miranda Schuyler's mother marries Hugh Fisher, whose summer house on Winthrop Island overlooks the famous lighthouse. Isobel Fisher, Miranda's new stepsister, is eager to draw Miranda into the arcane customs of Winthrop society. Miranda finds herself drawn to Joseph Vargas, whose father keeps the lighthouse. Joseph...
Author
Pub. Date
2016.
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
2007. Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself, his wife, Neni, and their six-year-old son.Working as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers, he displays the punctuality, discretion, and loyalty that Edwards demands. Neni temporary work at the Edwardses' summer home in the Hamptons means a brighter future-- until Jende and Neni notice cracks...
Author
Pub. Date
2019
Language
English
Formats
Description
A journalist describes the years she worked in low-paying domestic work under wealthy employers, contrasting the privileges of the upper-middle class to the realities of the overworked laborers supporting them.
Land's plans of breaking free from the roots of her hometown in the Pacific Northwest to chase her dreams were cut short when a summer fling turned into an unexpected pregnancy. She turned to housekeeping to make ends meet, took classes online...
Author
Publisher
HarperCollins
Pub. Date
2018
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Families today are squeezed on every side--from high childcare costs and harsh employment policies to workplaces without paid family leave or even dependable and regular working hours"--Jacket.
Attaining the standard of living our parents managed has become impossible. Quart examines the lives of many middle-class Americans who can now barely afford to raise children, and shows how our country has failed its families. She offers real solutions to...
Author
Pub. Date
2020
Language
English
Formats
Description
An audacious wonder of a novel about baseball and a future America,. The time: Some thirty-five years hence. The place: AutoAmerica--governed by "Aunt Nettie," an iBurrito of AI algorithms and the internet, in a land half under water. The people: Divided into the angelfair "Netted," whose fate it is to have jobs and live on high ground, and the mostly coppertoned "Surplus," whose jobs have been stripped and whose sole duty now is to consume, living...
Author
Publisher
Sourcebooks
Pub. Date
2021
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Alicia is a tech giant, wealthy beyond compare. Kelly is a stay-at-home mother and Stanford legacy. Maren makes three: single, broke, and out of place among the rich and elite. All their daughters are natural choices for Stanford: except the school can only recommend one student. As the competition heats up, an attempt is made on one of the girl's lives and the community spirals into panic. Now the mothers have to decide if one of them is capable...
Author
Pub. Date
2023
Language
English
Formats
Description
"From 1783, when German immigrant John Jacob Astor first arrived in the United States, until 2009, when Brooke Astor's son, Anthony Marshall, was convicted of defrauding his elderly mother, the Astor name occupied a unique place in American society. The family fortune, first made by a beaver trapping business that grew into an empire, was then amplified by holdings in Manhattan real estate. Over the ensuing generations, Astors ruled Gilded Age New...
Author
Publisher
Macmillan Audio
Pub. Date
2017
Language
English
Description
"Senator Elizabeth Warren has long been an outspoken champion of America's middle class, and by the time the people of Massachusetts elected her in 2012, she had become one of the country's leading progressive voices. Now, at a perilous moment for our nation, she has written a book that is at once an illuminating account of how we built the strongest middle class in history, a scathing indictment of those who have spent the past thirty-five years...
Author
Publisher
Beacon Press
Pub. Date
2018
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations such as "manifest destiny" and "Jacksonian democracy," and shows how placing African American,...
Author
Publisher
Simon & Schuster Audio
Pub. Date
2024
Language
English
Description
"Peabody and Emmy Award-winning journalist Jane Marie expands on her popular podcast The Dream to expose the scourge of multilevel marketing schemes and how they have profited off the evisceration of the American working class. We've all heard of Amway, Mary Kay, Tupperware, and LuLaRoe, but few know the nefarious way they and countless other multilevel marketing (MLM) companies prey on desperate Americans struggling to make ends meet. When factories...
Publisher
Anchor Bay Entertainment
Pub. Date
[2016]
Language
English
Description
Presents the theory that the American dream, all but abandoned in the United States, has been adopted successfully in other countries, including Italy, France, Finland, Slovenia, Germany, Portugal, Norway, Tunisia, and Iceland, looking at such areas as worker benefits, public expenditure for the common good, and state-funded higher education.
18) Class: a memoir
Author
Publisher
Simon & Schuster Audio
Pub. Date
2023
Language
English
Description
"When Stephanie Land set out to write her memoir Maid, she never could have imagined what was to come. Handpicked by President Barack Obama as one of the best books of 2019, it was called "an eye-opening journey into the lives of the working poor" (People). Later it was adapted into the hit Netflix series Maid, which was viewed by 67 million households and was Netflix's fourth most-watched show in 2021, garnering three Primetime Emmy Award nominations....
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2014
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Be Careful What You Wish For opens with Harry Clifton and his wife Emma rushing to learn the fate of their son Sebastian, who has been in a fatal car accident. But who died, Sebastian or his best friend? When Ross Buchanan is forced to resign as chairman of the Barrington Shipping Company, Emma Clifton wants to replace him. But Don Pedro Martinez intends to install his puppet, Alex Fisher, in order to destroy the Barrington family firm just as the...
Author
Pub. Date
2020
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a vacation: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter, and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they've rented for the week. The houseowners, Ruth and G. H., arrive in the middle of the night in a panic. They say a sudden blackout has swept the city: the TV and internet are down, and no cell phone service. Is the vacation...