Focusing on two romances - Jessica's dizzying infatuation with a hugely successful young heroin dealer, Boy George, and Coco's first love with Jessica's little brother, Cesar - Random Family is the story of young people trying to outrun their destinies. Jessica and Boy George ride the wild adventure between riches and ruin, while Coco and Cesar stick closer to the street, all four caught in a precarious dance between survival and death. Friends get murdered; the DEA and FBI investigate Boy George; Cesar becomes a fugitive; Jessica and Coco endure homelessness, betrayal, the heartbreaking separation of prison, and, throughout it all, the insidious damage of poverty.Charting the tumultuous cycle of the generations - as girls become mothers, boys become criminals, and hope struggles against deprivation - LeBlanc slips behind the cold statistics and sensationalism and comes back with a riveting, haunting, and true story.

    Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience working in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world’s poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. With passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence. Farmer challenges conventional thinking within human rights circles and exposes the relationships between political and economic injustice, on one hand, and the suffering and illness of the powerless, on the other.Farmer shows that the same social forces that give rise to epidemic diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis also sculpt risk for human rights violations. He illustrates the ways that racism and gender inequality in the United States are embodied as disease and death. Yet this book is far from a hopeless inventory of abuse. Farmer’s disturbing examples are linked to a guarded optimism that new medical and social technologies will develop in tandem with a more informed sense of social justice. Otherwise, he concludes, we will be guilty of managing social inequality rather than addressing structural violence. Farmer’s urgent plea to think about human rights in the context of global public health and to consider critical issues of quality and access for the world’s poor should be of fundamental concern to a world characterized by the bizarre proximity of surfeit and suffering.

    Drawing on in-depth observations of black and white middle-class, working-class, and poor families, Unequal Childhoods explores this fact, offering a picture of childhood today. Here are the frenetic families managing their children's hectic schedules of "leisure" activities; and here are families with plenty of time but little economic security. Lareau shows how middle-class parents, whether black or white, engage in a process of "concerted cultivation" designed to draw out children's talents and skills, while working-class and poor families rely on "the accomplishment of natural growth," in which a child's development unfolds spontaneously—as long as basic comfort, food, and shelter are provided. Each of these approaches to childrearing brings its own benefits and its own drawbacks. In identifying and analyzing differences between the two, Lareau demonstrates the power, and limits, of social class in shaping the lives of America's children.The first edition of Unequal Childhoods was an instant classic, portraying in riveting detail the unexpected ways in which social class influences parenting in white and African-American families. A decade later, Annette Lareau has revisited the same families and interviewed the original subjects to examine the impact of social class in the transition to adulthood.

    But alongside these encouraging signs, Thomas Shapiro argues in The Hidden Cost of Being African American, fundamentallevels of racial inequality persist, particularly in the area of asset accumulation--inheritance, savings accounts, stocks, bonds, home equity, and other investments. Shapiro reveals how the lack of these family assets along with continuing racial discrimination in crucial areas like homeownershipdramatically impact the everyday lives of many black families, reversing gains earned in schools and on jobs, and perpetuating the cycle of poverty in which far too many find themselves trapped. Shapiro uses a combination of in-depth interviews with almost 200 families from Los Angeles, Boston, and St. Louis, and national survey data with 10,000 families to show how racial inequality is transmitted across generations. We see how those families with private wealth are able to move up fromgeneration to generation, relocating to safer communities with better schools and passing along the accompanying advantages to their children. At the same time those without significant wealth remain trapped in communities that don't allow them to move up, no matter how hard they work. Shapirochallenges white middle class families to consider how the privileges that wealth brings not only improve their own chances but also hold back people who don't have them. This wealthfare is a legacy of inequality that, if unchanged, will project social injustice far into the future. Showing that over half of black families fall below the asset poverty line at the beginning of the new century, The Hidden Cost of Being African American will challenge all Americans to reconsider what must be done to end racial inequality.

    This book is a story that sends the reader careening through episodes of childhood abuse, teenage drug addiction, and as an adult the compulsion to repeat the sins of his father.

    That means "no extras," so Emma must be content to make her own stories and books. Emma has a plan, though – she's going to save all the money she earns picking apples and put it in Mama's hard-times jar. Then there will surely be enough for extras. But when Mama tells Emma that this year she has to go to school instead of to work, it spoils everything. Now she will never own a store-bought book! But school turns out to have a wonderful surprise in store for Emma.Based on Ethel Footman Smothers's childhood, the story is brought to life with lush acrylic paintings, giving us a touching portrait of a book-hungry child.

    In Tanzania, Bernardi's mute grandfather makes him a wonderful music box and then helps him realize his dream of owning a soccer ball and going to school.

    Largely absent from the debate, however, is any discussion of past practices. In this book, historian Timothy Miller argues that it is necessary to look at the history of orphanages, of their successes and failures, and of their complex roles as social institutions for unwanted and homeless children.In The Orphans of Byzantium, Miller provides a perceptive and original study of the evolution of orphanages in the Byzantine Empire. Contrary to popular belief and even expert opinion, medieval child-welfare systems were sophisticated, especially in the Byzantine world. Combining ancient Roman legal institutions with Christian concepts of charity, the Byzantine Empire evolved a child-welfare system that tried either to select foster parents for homeless children or to place them in group homes that could provide food, shelter, and education. Miller discusses how successive Byzantine emperors tried to improve Roman regulations to provide greater security for orphans, and notes that they achieved their greatest success when they widened the pool of potential guardians by allowing women relatives to accept the duties of guardianship. After a thorough discussion of each element of the Byzantine child care system, the book closes by showing how Byzantine orphanages provided models for later Western group homes, especially in Italy. From these renaissance orphan asylums evolved the system of modern European and American religious orphanages until the foster care movement emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. Miller's study of these systems can provide useful models for reforming the troubled child-welfare system today.Timothy S. Miller is Professor of History at Salisbury University in Maryland. He has written or edited numerous books and articles on the Byzantine Empire, including The Birth of the Hospital in the Byzantine Empire and Peace and War in Byzantium.Praise for the book:"A very important contribution to Byzantine social and family history. . . . Like his other works, The Orphans of Byzantium commends Professor Miller as an indefatigable researcher and leading social historian of the Byzantine era. [This] is an original book, extensively researched, well documented, and readable, of value to students and teachers of Byzantine civilization, and the history of philanthropy and welfare. . . . Dr. Miller deserves congratulations and our gratitude for making another major contribution to Byzantine studies."--Demetrios J. Constantelos, Catholic Historical Review"Timothy Miller has become an expert on the Byzantine Empire's system of social welfare, and here he provides an exhaustive study at a millennium of Byzantine care of orphans. . . . Miller's work is, by any gauge, thorough, and while there is not a plethora of evidence on this topic, readers can be sure that Miller has carefully analysed what there is."--Daniel Boice, Catholic Library Wolrd"What should a morally responsible society do with orphans? Ignore and thus condone possible slavery, certain neglect, probable death? Encourage adoption? Institutionalize and therefore confine and marginalize? In this handsomely produced text, established Byzantine historian Miller (Salisbury Univ.) explicitly addresses a perennial issue of social policy by investigating and assessing the strategies that the classical and Byzantine worlds employed for abandoned or neglected children. Miller competently reviews the Hellenistic and Roman legalities and realities that Byzantine church, state, and private society sought to improve, then informatively describes the importance of the orphanage as institution (religiously or privately controlled); the sometimes effective encouragement (notably, by giving female kin greate

    Foreword by Noam Chomsky, with contributions by Frei Betto, Marcos Arruda, Johan Galtung, Leonardo Boff, Sohail Inayatullah, Ravi Batra, Mark Friedman. The book asserts that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, based as it is on greed, intense competition and the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. In contrast, Prout provides a model of economic development grounded in universal values. It seeks to balance regional self-reliant economic development with ecological protection, and encourages creativity and innovation. In his preface to the book, Noam Chomsky stated, "Alternative visions are crucial at this moment in history. Prout's cooperative model of economic democracy, based on cardinal human values and sharing the resources of the planet for the welfare of everyone, deserves our serious consideration." Historian Howard Zinn, author of the best-selling A People's History of the United States, wrote: "After Capitalism is refreshingly original. It is spiritual and utopian while remaining grounded in reality. Its analysis is intelligent and its vision inspiring."

    School delinquency, school dropout, teenage pregnancy, out-of-wedlock childbirth, violent crime, and drug abuse are magnified in neighborhoods where the majority of residents are poor. In response, policymakers have embarked on a large and coordinated effort to "deconcentrate" the urban poor by dispersing the residents of subsidized housing. Despite the clean logic of these policies, however, deconcentration is not a clean process. In Clearing the Way, Edward Goetz goes beyond the narrow analysis that has informed the debate so far, using the experience of Minneapolis-Saint Paul to explore the fierce political debate and complicated issues that arise when public housing residents are dispersed, sometimes against their will. Along the way, he explores the cases for and against deconcentrating the poor, the programs used to pursue this goal, and the research used to evaluate their success. Clearing the Way offers important lessons for policymakers, activists, and anyone interested in poverty in America.