"[The author] takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the 20 dollars a month she has left after paying for their rundown apartment. Scott is a gentle nurse consumed by a heroin addiction. Lamar, a man with no legs and a neighborhood full of boys to look after, tries to work his way out of debt. Vanetta participates in a botched...

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption....

"We save ourselves by saving others." It's been five years since the Sweep disappeared. Orphaned and alone, Nan Sparrow had no other choice but to work for a ruthless chimney sweep named Wilkie Crudd. She spends her days sweeping out chimneys. The job is dangerous and thankless, but with her wits and will, Nan has managed to beat the deadly odds time and time again. When Nan gets stuck in a chimney fire, she fears the end has come. Instead, she wakes...

"Meet Denver, raised under plantation-style slavery in Louisiana until he escaped "da Man" in the 1960s by hopping a train. He then spends 18 homeless years on the streets of Dallas until he meets Deborah. Her husband, Ron, an international art dealer accustomed to the world of Armani suits and art-collecting millionaires is uncomfortable with Denver. Then the story takes a devastating twist when Deborah discovers she has cancer. Will Ron embrace...

This book is about the thousands of people who live in the subway, railroad, and sewage tunnels of New York City.

A chronicle based on four years of reporting follows five teenage girls as they come of age in one of the most challenging and geographically isolated regions on the Eastern seaboard--Washington County, Maine.

That was the simple yet groundbreaking question William T. Vollmann asked in cities and villages around the globe. The result of Vollmann's fearless inquiry is a view of poverty unlike any previously offered. Poor People struggles to confront poverty in all its hopelessness and brutality, its pride and abject fear, its fierce misery and quiet resignation, allowing the poor to explain the causes and consequences of their impoverishment in their...

"The heartbreaking, timeless, and redemptive story of the transformative friendship binding a fallen-from-grace NFL player and a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist who meet on the streets of New Orleans, offering a rare glimpse into the precarious world of homelessness and the lingering impact of systemic racism and poverty on the lives of NOLA's citizens"--

In a society where a person's size is directly proportional to his or her wealth, littlepoor Warner, thirteen, and Prayer, fifteen, struggle to improve their lot in a world built against them.

"In this provocative critique of class and power in America, renowned anti-racist Tim Wise expands his well-developed analysis of privilege rooted in whiteness to include social domination wielded by the wealthy few. Tracing how sympathy for the underlcass, abundant during the Depression, has been erased, Wise counters the contemporary portrayal of the poor as riff-raff and the rich as celebrities"--