With lyricism and passion, Roy combines her literary talents and encyclopedic knowledge to expose injustice and provide hope for a future world."Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead."—From the CDArundhati Roy is an outspoken critic of globalization and American influence. She has authored four books, -including The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize. This summer, she will accept the Lannan Award for Cultural Freedom.

    It was these concerns that prompted indie icon Michelle Tea--whose memoir The Chelsea Whistle details her own working-class roots in gritty Chelsea, Massachusetts--to collect these fierce, honest, tender essays written by women who can’t go home to the suburbs when their assignment is over. These wide-ranging essays cover everything from stealing and selling blood to make ends meet, to "jumping" class, how if time equals money then being poor means waiting, surviving and returning to the ghetto and how feminine identity is shaped by poverty. Contributors include Dorothy Allison, Diane Di Prima, Terri Griffith, Daisy Hernández, Frances Varian, Tara Hardy, Shawna Kenney, Siobhan Brooks, Terri Ryan, and more.

    Since she left Jamaica for America after her father died, Zettie lives in a car with her mother while they both go to school and plan for a real home.

    They went to the streets with a single intention: to be as present as possible to everyone we met, offering them sustained and nonjudgmental attention. Such attention is the heart of compassion. This book chronicles their streets experiences. It will thrust you out the door of your comfortable life, straight into the unknown. It will force you to confront what might happen to you, and who you might become, if suddenly you had no home. The meditative narrative is accompanied by pinhole photographs shot by James using cameras he constructed from trash. This is the third edition of the book, lightly edited. Though recounting events that occurred in 1999, The Emptiness of Our Hands remains as relevant today as ever. An "eye-opening" and "life-changing" read! Read this book on its own or in the company of Practicing Presence: Insights from the Streets, which Phyllis wrote on the tenth anniversary of her time on the streets. Take your reading slow, perhaps one chapter per day, so you can absorb and reflect. If you happen to be Christian, you might consider using this book and Practicing Presence as companion resources during Lent and Holy Week, which served as a backdrop for Phyllis and James's experience. But you don’t need to be a Christian to take this stumbling journey into practicing mindfulness on the streets. Just allow these forty-seven days to be for you what they were for Phyllis and James: a deep embrace of core values that human beings around the world have held in common for millennia. These values might best be articulated as questions: How do we treat others as we would have them treat us? How do we love our neighbors, including those who seem “alien” and “other?” How do we extend hospitality to strangers, allowing them an honored place among us? These age-old questions have no simple answers. We must seek to answer them daily with our lives. Get your free sampler of Phyllis's work when you join her mailing list at http://subscribe.phylliscoledai.com/. It includes music, poetry, spiritual nonfiction and historical fiction. You can also join her mailing list at http://www.phylliscoledai.com. CATEGORIES FOR THIS BOOK: --spirituality --memoir --mindfulness --homelessness --Lent & Holy Week --social conscience --engaged Buddhism

    In this masterful work, New York Times reporter and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Jason DeParle cuts between the mean streets of Milwaukee and the corridors of Washington to produce the definitive account. As improbable as fiction, and equally fast-paced, this classic of literary journalism has captured the acclaim of the Left and Right. At the heart of the story are three cousins, inseparable at the start but launched on differing arcs. Leaving welfare, Angie puts her heart in her work. Jewell bets on an imprisoned man. Opal guards a tragic secret that threatens her kids and her life. DeParle traces back their family history six generations to slavery, and weaves poor people, politicians, reformers, and rogues into a spellbinding epic. At times, the very idea of America seemed on trial: we live in a country where anyone can make it, yet generation after generation some families don't. Washington Post: "Riveting... like a searing novel of urban realism - Theodore Dreiser comes to Milwaukee." Chicago Tribune: "Sweeping scope and dramatic detail worthy of Charles Dickens."

    Shipler makes clear in this powerful, humane study, the invisible poor are engaged in the activity most respected in American ideology—hard, honest work. But their version of the American Dream is a nightmare: low-paying, dead-end jobs; the profound failure of government to improve upon decaying housing, health care, and education; the failure of families to break the patterns of child abuse and substance abuse. Shipler exposes the interlocking problems by taking us into the sorrowful, infuriating, courageous lives of the poor—white and black, Asian and Latino, citizens and immigrants. We encounter them every day, for they do jobs essential to the American economy.We meet drifting farmworkers in North Carolina, exploited garment workers in New Hampshire, illegal immigrants trapped in the steaming kitchens of Los Angeles restaurants, addicts who struggle into productive work from the cruel streets of the nation's capital—each life another aspect of a confounding, far-reaching urgent national crisis. And unlike mostworks on poverty, this one delves into the calculations of some employers as well—their razor-thin profits, their anxieties about competition from abroad, their frustrations in finding qualified workers.This impassioned book not only dissects the problems, but makes pointed, informed recommendations for change. It is a book that stands to make a difference.

    Instead it is venturing alone into the deepest urban jungle, where human nature is the dangerous, incomprehensible and sometimes wildly uplifting force that tests not only your ability to survive but also your own humanity.One cold November day, Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall heads out on just such a quest. He packs up a new tent, some clothes, his notebooks and a pen and goes to live in Tent City, twenty-seven lawless acres where the largest hobo town on the continent squats in the scandalized shadow of Canada’s largest city. The rules he sets for himself are simple: no access to money, family or friends, except what he can find from that day on. He’ll do whatever people in Tent City do to get by, be whatever bum, wino, beggar, hustler, criminal, junkie or con man he chooses to be on any given day.When he arrives, he finds a dump full of the castaways of the last millennium, human and otherwise. On the edge of the world, yet somehow smack in the middle of it all, fugitives, drug addicts, prostitutes, dealers and ex-cons have created an anarchic society, where the rules are made up nightly and your life depends on knowing them. Not only does Bishop-Stall manage to survive until the bulldozers come, but against all odds his own heart and spirit slowly mend. An astonishing account of birth, suicide, brawls, binges, tears, crazed laughter, good and bad intentions, fiendish charity and the sudden eloquence and generosity of broken souls, Down to This is Bishop-Stall’s iridescent love song to a lost city like no other.From the Hardcover edition.

    It partakes of a broader reconstruction of the state wedding restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” under a philosophy of moral behaviorism. This paternalist program of penalization of poverty aims to curb the urban disorders wrought by economic deregulation and to impose precarious employment on the postindustrial proletariat. It also erects a garish theater of civic morality on whose stage political elites can orchestrate the public vituperation of deviant figures—the teenage “welfare mother,” the ghetto “street thug,” and the roaming “sex predator”—and close the legitimacy deficit they suffer when they discard the established government mission of social and economic protection. By bringing developments in welfare and criminal justice into a single analytic framework attentive to both the instrumental and communicative moments of public policy, Punishing the Poor shows that the prison is not a mere technical implement for law enforcement but a core political institution. And it reveals that the capitalist revolution from above called neoliberalism entails not the advent of “small government” but the building of an overgrown and intrusive penal state deeply injurious to the ideals of democratic citizenship.Visit the author’s website.

    For many years Noelie has provided goat's milk for people who need it and has sent her extra goat kids to poor people in poor countries through the Heifer Project. The children's mother paints a series of portraits of the "Goat Lady," and her art show at the local town hall helps the rest of the community see Noelie's kindness and courage.

    Reuters journalist Alan Elsner shows how prisons really work, how race-based gangs are able to control institutions and prey on weaker inmates, and how an epidemic of abuse and brutality has exploded across American prisons. Readers will discover the plight of 300,000 mentally ill people in prisons, virtually abandoned with little medical treatment. They'll also meet the fastest growing segment of the prison population: women. Readers go inside "supermax" prisons that cut inmates off from all human contact, and uncover the official corruption and brutality that riddles jail systems in major cities like Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, and New York. Finally, they'll learn prisons accelerate the spread of infectious diseases throughout the broader society--just one of the many ways the prison epidemic touches everyone, even if they've never met anyone who's gone to jail.

    MacLeod's return eight years later, and the resulting 1995 revision, revealed little improvement in the lives of these men as they struggled in the labor market and crime-ridden underground economy. This classic ethnography addresses one of the most important issues in modern social theory and policy: how social inequality is reproduced from one generation to the next. Now republished with a preface by Joe Feagin, Ain't No Makin' It remains an admired and invaluable text.

    Tirelessly, before the kinds of vast crowds reserved for rock stars, RFK articulated with passionate eloquence the disasters of a misguided war, the pain of the dispossessed, and the way out of war and poverty. And then, 81 days into the campaign, he was assassinated. Now, in The Gospel According to RFK, writer Norman MacAfee has brought together for the first time the best of Kennedy's presidential campaign speeches and contributes lively and engaging commentary that makes them fresh, relevant, and especially timely.

    As advocates, activists, policy makers, and homeless people focused attention on market-based and individualized practices of reform and governance, collective efforts that challenged an economy dependent on low wage jobs, declining housing affordability, and the dismantling of the social safety net were marginalized and ignored. Homelessness continued, despite, and partly due to, the limitations of the neoliberal approach. Combining the rich detail of an ethnographic study with the systemic examination of political economic studies, this book offers a view of homelessness and inequality that is rarely explored elsewhere. Chapters include discussion of the medicalization of homelessness, the difficulty of finding paid employment given broader political economic conditions, how shelter staff are trained to manage homeless people, how statistics are used to produce ideas of homeless people as deviants, and how funding concerns affect possibilities for resistance. Key to the study is an activist approach that raises the possibilities and problems associated with a publicly engaged anthropology.

    DeVol, is a set of two workbooks for people in poverty that shows how to use the hidden rules of class to build up financial, emotional, social, and other resources. Understanding the hidden rules of the middle class and wealth, and choosing to use them, can open doors to new relationships, new jobs, and higher resources. The workbook is designed to be used as an investigation tool by people working in groups with a trained facilitator. The participants explore the impact that poverty has had on them, investigate economic realities, complete a self-assessment of their own resources, make plans to build their own resources, and develop a mental model of community prosperity.

    Tim Chester constructs an approach to social action that is shaped and inspired by the gospel.

    Richard Wilkinson, a pioneering social scientist, addresses the growing feeling--so common in the United States--that modern societies, despite their material success, are social failures. The Impact of Inequality explains why inequality has such devastating effects on the quality and length of our lives.Wilkinson shows that inequality leads to stress, stress creates sickness on the individual and mass level, and overall society suffers widespread unhappiness and high levels of violence, depression, and mistrust across the social spectrum. The evidence he presents is incontrovertible: social and political equality are essential to improve life for everyone. Wilkinson argues that even small reductions in inequality can make an important difference--for, as this book explains, social relations are always built on material foundations.

    Original.

    And so, approche.... " -- James Carville Mama always said, "You're never poor if you have a loving family and one good friend." Well, Lu has a family but no friend -- so maybe she is just a little poor. How all changes one day down on the Louisiana bayou -- when Lu comes face-to-face with a for-real, live swamp ghost -- is at the heart of this flavorful, funny...and compassionate story. Meet a girl with lots of pluck and plenty of courage in this Depression-era tale that's based on an episode in the childhood of James Carville's mother.

    But with her parents busy making ends meet on the farm, it'¬?s up to Donna to find a solution. After months of toil-and some help from her brother and sisters-she earns enough money to buy the family a real bathtub. This warm, true story illustrates the value of a dollar and what can be accomplished by working together toward a goal. Loaded with primary source material. Wonderful addition to an American history, math, or economics curriculum.

    The contributors to Class Matters contest this demise. Although differing in their approaches, they all agree that socioeconomic inequality remains indispensable to a true understanding of the transition from the early modern to modern era in North America and the rest of the Atlantic world. As a whole, they chart the emergence of class as a concept and its subsequent loss of analytic purchase in Anglo-American historiography.The opening section considers the dynamics of class relations in the Atlantic world across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--from Iroquoian and Algonquian communities in North America to tobacco lords in Glasgow. Subsequent chapters examine the cultural development of a new and aspirational middle class and its relationship to changing economic conditions and the articulation of corporate and industrial ideologies in the era of the American Revolution and beyond.A final section shifts the focus to the poor and vulnerable--tenant farmers, infant paupers, and the victims of capital punishment. In each case the authors describe how elite Americans exercised their political and social power to structure the lives and deaths of weaker members of their communities. An impassioned afterword urges class historians to take up the legacies of historical materialism. Engaging the difficulties and range of meanings of class, the essays in Class Matters seek to energize the study of social relations in the Atlantic world.