Best of
Poverty

2014

Maddi's Fridge


Lois Brandt - 2014
    But because Sofia wants to help her friend, she’s faced with a difficult decision: to keep her promise or tell her parents about Maddi’s empty fridge.Filled with colorful artwork, this storybook addresses issues of poverty with honesty and sensitivity while instilling important lessons in friendship, empathy, trust, and helping others.A call to action section, with six effective ways for children to help fight hunger and information on antihunger groups, is also included.

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap


Matt Taibbi - 2014
    Crime goes down. The prison population doubles. Fraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world's wealth. The rich get massively richer. No one goes to jail.In search of a solution, journalist Matt Taibbi discovered the Divide, the seam in American life where our two most troubling trends--growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration--come together, driven by a dramatic shift in American citizenship: Our basic rights are now determined by our wealth or poverty. The Divide is what allows massively destructive fraud by the hyperwealthy to go unpunished, while turning poverty itself into a crime--but it's impossible to see until you look at these two alarming trends side by side.

Helping Without Hurting in Short-Term Missions: Leader's Guide


Steve Corbett - 2014
    This stand-alone resource applies the principles of that book specifically to short term missions.Helping Without Hurting: Short Term MissionsLeader’s Guide is aimed at the preparation and debriefing of short-term missionaries. Accompanying Helping Without Hurting: Short Term Missions Participants’ Guide, it is an ideal resource for church leaders, missions pastors, and youth pastors who make short-term missions planning decisions and desire to prevent inadvertent harm as they enter materially poor communities. With direction for designing STMs well in light of the principles of When Helping Hurt, practical examples from short-term trips to illustrate those principles, and suggested resources for further learning and implimentatin, this guide is an all-in-one manual for leaders. Plus, it shows the content of the participant’s guide with annotation and teaching notes to guide leaders as they facilitate sessions with participants.

Black and White: The Way I See It


Richard Williams - 2014
    The father of Venus and Serena Williams had a grand plan for his daughters. The source of his vision, the method behind his execution, and the root of his indomitable spirit he held private. Until now. What he reveals about his success—his story of struggle, determination, hard work, and family—is told in the pages of this inspiring memoir, Black and White: The Way I See It.Richard Williams, for the first time ever, shares stories about the poverty and violence of his early life in Shreveport, Louisiana, in the 1940s—a life that could have ended on the day he was born because of indifference, racism, and cruelty were it not for the strength of his mother and the kindness of a stranger. Williams’s mother was his hero, just as he became a hero to Venus and Serena, who express in the book the lessons he taught them and how much they love their much-criticized and even maligned father. His critics claimed that he was “in the way” of his daughters’ athletic success, that he was “destroying his daughters’ marketing and advertising abilities,” and even accused him of “abuse.”Richard Williams describes a family life held together by the principles that matter most: courage, confidence, commitment, faith, and above all, love.“When you’re younger, as a female, you flock to your father. When you get older, you’re closer to your mother. I still feel really, really close to my father. . . . We have a great relationship. There is an appreciation. There is a closeness because of what we’ve been through together, and a respect,” says Serena.“Training started early for my kids, but it wasn’t only on the tennis courts. I used to take Venus and Serena to work with me so they could learn the importance of planning, responsibility, and a strong work ethic, even at their early age,” Richard Williams writes. The self-made man saw the value of education and had the discipline to practice what he learned. He went so far as to write a plan for his family’s future before his tennis champion daughters were ever born.Richard Williams has walked a long, hard, exciting, and ultimately rewarding road for seventy years, fighting every hand raised against him while raising a loving family and two of the greatest tennis players who ever lived.

I Am #12: Lebron James


Grace Norwich - 2014
    His accomplishments on and off the court will appeal to a wide audience-especially boys. He's the perfect person to lead with as the I AM series expands to include more current subjects.The updated I AM series features full-color illustrated covers, and a mix of photos and illustrations throughout the interiors. A timeline, an introduction to the people you'll meet in the book, maps, sidebars, and a top ten list of important things to know help young readers understand the text and align the series with Common Core State Standards.

Twenty-Two Cents: Muhammad Yunus and the Village Bank


Paula Yoo - 2014
    Includes an afterword and author's sources"--

The Franciscan Heart of Thomas Merton: A New Look at the Spiritual Inspiration of His Life, Thought, and Writing


Daniel P. Horan - 2014
    Millions of Christians and non-Christians look to Thomas Merton for spiritual wisdom and guidance, but to whom did Merton look? In The Franciscan Heart of Thomas Merton, Franciscan friar and author Daniel Horan shows how, both before and after he became a Trappist monk, Merton's life was shaped by his love for St. Francis and for the Franciscan spiritual and intellectual tradition. Given recent renewed interest in St. Francis, this timely resource is both informative and practical, revealing a previously hidden side of Merton that will inspire a new generation of Christians to live richer, deeper, and more justice-minded lives of faith.

Silent Voices: People with Mental Disorders on the Street


Robert L. Okin - 2014
    Because of our fear and revulsion, we fail to see any human connection with them. Still, we're curious: How do they end up on the street? How do they survive the stress and privations of such a life? What combination of biological vulnerabilities, childhood traumas, drugs, mental disorders, and financial devastation brought them down? And how do some manage, against all odds, to climb out of this desperate situation?Former commissioner of mental health Robert Okin spent two years on the street meeting and photographing homeless individuals with mental illness to find answers to these questions. He masterfully brings these people to life through stories and images that are intimate and gritty.This is a book about hope, not just grief and despair. It challenges us to face the situation and do something about it rather than simply look a

Living on a Dollar a Day: The Lives and Faces of the World's Poor


Thomas Nazario - 2014
    Slightly over one billion people on the planet live on a dollar a day. While the reasons for their poverty may be different across geographic regions and political circumstances, the results are much the same. Extreme poverty robs people of options in life, and the cycle is nearly impossible to break without help. While the poor often work very hard at jobs many of us would not even consider doing, not having access to basic health care and education keeps them at the bottom of the economic ladder, usually for generations.Living on a Dollar a Day shares the personal stories of some these poorest of the poor, honoring their lives, their struggles, and encouraging action in those who can help. In making this beautiful and moving book a team traveled to four continents, took thousands of photographs, conducted numerous interviews, and researched information on the agencies around the world that strive to help the destitute. The resulting stories and photographs offer a heartrending glimpse into the everyday realities of individuals and families facing extreme poverty. Personal profiles give voice to their experience, and research about the root causes of global poverty is shared along with information on how those in more fortunate circumstances can get involved.Living on a Dollar a Day gives the largely invisible poor a face and a voice. In a world that grows more and more connected and interdependent, the issues that affect one person eventually affect us all. This important book is a powerful call to action for anyone who wishes to help alleviate human suffering.

Our Shawnee


Precious Barnett - 2014
    They tackle diverse topics such as experiences in the juvenile justice system, learning to fly an airplane, the stresses of unstable housing, the lasting impacts of small acts of kindness and support, the challenges of life after a severe head trauma, and the untimely deaths of loved ones. Alongside their accounts are stories of friends and family members whom they have interviewed. The vibrancy of their voices and the substance of their stories are testaments to their resilience, courage, and writing talent--and to the richness of lives in often-overlooked parts of Louisville. 232 8"x9" pages, with gorgeous full color throughout.

Out of Poverty


Benjamin Powell - 2014
    It explains how these sweatshops provide the best available opportunity to workers and how they play an important role in the process of development that eventually leads to better wages and working conditions. Using economic theory, the author argues that much of what the anti-sweatshop movement has agitated for would actually harm the very workers they intend to help by creating less desirable alternatives and undermining the process of development. Nowhere does this book put "profits" or "economic efficiency" above people. Improving the welfare of poorer citizens of third world countries is the goal, and the book explores which methods best achieve that goal. Out of Poverty will help readers understand how activists and policy makers can help third world workers.

Freeway Rick Ross: The Untold Autobiography


Rick Ross - 2014
    It's also the story of a boy born in poverty Texas who grew up in a single-parent household in the heart of South Central, who was pushed through the school system each year and came out illiterate. His options were few, and he turned to drug dealing. This Untold Autobiography is not only personal, but also historical in its implications. Rick Ross chronicles the times by highlighting the social climate that made crack cocaine so desirable, and he points out that at the time, the "cops in the area didn't know what crack was; they didn't associate the small white rocks they saw on homies as illegal drugs." All Rick Ross knew was people wanted it.

Our Heroes: How Kids Are Making a Difference


Janet Wilson - 2014
    In addition to the ten main profiles, sidebars feature many more children. Included is eleven-year-old Andrew Adansi-Bonnah from Ghana, who raised thousands of dollars for refugee children in Somalia after seeing their desperate situation covered in the news. Another child profiled is twelve-year-old Mimi Ausland from the United States, nicknamed "Dr. Doolittle" by her family. After learning about the shortage of food for shelter animals, she started a website to collect donations of dog and cat food; her site is now one of the most visited animal-rescue websites in the world. These children never set out to be heroes or to become famous, but they are role-models for us all.

The When Helping Hurts Small Group Experience


Brian Fikkert - 2014
    Now there is a stand-alone resource to introduce this paradigm in an accessible way. Rather than simply looking at economics, it looks at the poverty of relationships between man and God, man and man, man and creation, and man and self. Utilizing free, online video lessons set both in Africa and the United States, the Small Group Experience is the ideal resource for small groups, Sunday school classes, parachurch and non-profit ministries, ministry training, and even individuals. In six lessons the concepts of When Helping Hurts are brought to the reader in a format that is perfect for training, discussion, and application. It is an ideal introduction to life-changing ideas and offers the perfect context for engagement. The videos provide expert instruction, and the Small group Experience provides questions and prompts for conversation, deeper learning, and taking action.

Life in a Global Village


Gary Miller - 2014
    What if the world population were shrunk to a village of 100 people, and you lived in that village? How would your neighbors live? What would they believe? How would that change your perspective? This book gives a glimpse into the world outside our own communities and helps us see the world through the eyes of Jesus.

We Were Wrong


Keith Stewart - 2014
    God would use Africa to save him from himself and his self-serving paradigm of ministry. This is a story of conversion and waking up to an expansive view of the fullness of the gospel.

Caged Warrior


Alan Sitomer - 2014
    As a star fighter in the gritty underground Mixed Martial Arts circuit in the poorest section of Detroit, McCutcheon fights under the tutelage of his volatile and violent father, not so much for himself but to survive as protector of his beloved five-year old sister, Gemma. We get to know McCutcheon as he battles opponents who are literally trying to kill him. Mr. Freedman, his science teacher, spots his intellectual potential, befriends him, and encourages him to enter the lottery for a scholarship to an elite charter school so he can obtain a first-class education. He is at first dead-set against the idea, and of course his tyrannical father forbids it. But the school's headmaster, Kaitlyn, a student assigned to be his guide, and Mr. Freedman continue to encourage him to consider it. His father and the Priests, the local Mafia-like crew that run Detroit's organized crime, have other plans for McCutcheon. For them, he is simply a tool to make them money. And when that cash flow is threatened, his father hits McCutcheon where it hurts most-he hides Gemma and threatens his own son that he'll never see his beloved sister again if he doesn't play by the Priests' rules.For the first time in his life, McCutcheon reaches out for help. Mr. Freedman turns out to have a very mysterious past and not only helps McCutcheon find his sister but also his mother who had simply disappeared on McCutcheon's 13th birthday. All seems well, but happy endings aren't really something McCutcheon feels he can rely on. And he may be right.A ferocious novel, Caged Warrior is like a great fight movie, a tour-de-force of relentless conflict, but one that is leavened with rich characters and meaningful and loving relationships.

Unsettled


Colin Woodard - 2014
    The story – which unfolded for 29 straight days and concluded with an epilogue a week later – traces the recent history of Maine’s Passamaquoddy people and explains how past events continue to affect their lives today. Reporter Colin Woodard spent more than a year researching "Unsettled," logging thousands of miles and more than 250 hours of interviews with 70 sources, including past governors of Maine and the reservations. The result is a story that shocked many in Maine.

This is Not for You


Venus Soileau - 2014
    This is Not for You is a memoir which vividly describes the memories of growing up in a dysfunctional environment and how these circumstances developed a spirit within the narrator. This is a story of resiliency and drive to overcome the extreme adversities that addiction and poverty can create in the life of a young child.

The Political Spirituality of Cesar Chavez: Crossing Religious Borders


Luis D. León - 2014
    Focusing on Chavez's own writings, Leon argues that La Causa can be fruitfully understood as a quasi-religious movement based on Chavez's charismatic leadership, which he modeled after Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi. Chavez recognized that spiritual prophecy, or political spirituality, was the key to disrupting centuries-old dehumanizing narratives that conflated religion with race. Chavez's body became emblematic for Chicano identity and enfleshed a living revolution. While there is much debate and truth-seeking around how he is remembered, through investigating the leader's construction of his own public memory, the author probes the meaning of the discrepancies. By refocusing Chavez's life and beliefs into three broad movements--mythology, prophecy, and religion--Leon brings us a moral and spiritual agent to match the political leader.

Risky Compassion


Ashley J. Barker - 2014
    From this extreme context he explores the story of the Good Samaritan and teases out life's risky questions and implications for each of us. Ash brilliantly identifies those qualities that can enable you to go deeper in life - no matter where you live.

In God's Hands: The Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent Book 2015


Desmond Tutu - 2014
    It is a meditation on the infinite love of God and the infinite value of the human individual. Not only are we in God's hands, says Desmond Tutu, our names are engraved on the palms of God's hands. Throughout an often turbulent life, Archbishop Tutu has fought for justice and against oppression and prejudice. As we learn in this book, what has driven him forward is an unshakeable belief that human beings are created in the image of God and are infinitely valuable. Each one of us is a God-carrier, a tabernacle, a sanctuary of the Divine Trinity. God loves us not because we are loveable but because he first loved us. And this turns our values upside down. In this sense, the Gospel is the most radical thing imaginable.It is extremely moving that in this book Archbishop Tutu returns to something so simple and so profound after a life in which he has been involved in political, social, and ethical issues that have seemed to be so very complex.

John Wesley in America: Restoring Primitive Christianity


Geordan Hammond - 2014
    Geordan Hammond presents the first book-length study of Wesley's experience in America, providing an innovative contribution to debates about the significance of a formative period of Wesley's life. John Wesley in America addresses Wesley's Georgia mission in fresh perspective by interpreting it in its immediate context. In order to re-evaluate this period of Wesley's life, Hammond carefully considers Wesley's writings and those of his contemporaries. A laboratory for implementing his views ofprimitive Christianity, the mission served to restore the doctrine, discipline, and practice of the early church in the pristine Georgia wilderness. Understanding the centrality of primitive Christianity to Wesley's thinking and pastoral methods is essential to comprehending his experience inAmerica. Wesley's conception of primitive Christianity was rooted in his embrace of patristic scholarship at Oxford. The most direct influence, however, was the High Church ecclesiology of the Usager Nonjurors who inspired him with their commitment to the restoration of the primitive church.

Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry


Susanne Soederberg - 2014
    A key inquiry of this book is what is the financial in which the poor are asked to join. Instead of embracing the mainstream position that financial inclusion is a natural, inevitable and mutually beneficial arrangement, "Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry" suggests that the structural violence inherent to neoliberalism and credit-led accumulation have created and normalized a reality in which the working poor can no longer afford to live without expensive credit.The book further transcends economic treatments of credit and debt by revealing how the poverty industry is extricably linked to the social power of money, the paradoxes in credit-led accumulation, and debtfarism. The latter refers to rhetorical and regulatory forms of governance that mediate and facilitate the expansion of the poverty industry and the reliance of the poor on credit to augment/replace their wages. Through a historically grounded analysis, the author examines various dimensions of the poverty industry ranging from the credit card, payday loan, and student loan industries in the United States to micro-lending and low-income housing finance industries in Mexico.Providing a much-needed theorization of the politics of debt, "Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry" has wider implications of the increasing dependence of the poor on consumer credit across the globe, this book will be of very strong interest to students and scholars of Global Political Economy, Finance, Development Studies, Geography, Law, History, and Sociology.

Roald Dahl and Philosophy: A Little Nonsense Now and Then


Jacob Held - 2014
    Classics like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Matilda, and The BFG may initially appear to be yarns spun for the amusement of the adolescent mind, however, upon digging deeper one uncovers a treasure trove of philosophical richness that is anything but childish, but in fact reveals the true existential weight, and multi-layered meaning of some of our favorite children's stories. Editor Jacob M. Held has collected the insights of today's leading philosophers into the significances, messages, and greater truths at which Dahl's rhythmic writing winks, revealing a whole new way to appreciate the creation of a man and mind to which readers of all ages are still drawn.

Soccer Star


Mina Javaherbin - 2014
    When Paulo Marcelo Feliciano becomes a soccer star, crowds will cheer his famous name! Then his mother won’t have to work long hours, and he won’t have to work all day on a fishing boat. For now, Paulo takes care of his little sister Maria (she teaches him reading, he teaches her soccer moves) and walks her to school, stopping to give his teammates cheese buns as they set out to shine people’s shoes or perform for the tourist crowd. At day’s end, it’s time to plan the game, where Givo will bounce, Carlos will kick, and Jose will fly! But when Jose falls on his wrist, will the team finally break the rules and let a girl show her stuff? Set in a country whose resilient soccer stars are often shaped by poverty, this uplifting tale of transcending the expected scores a big win for all.

The Price of Thirst: Global Water Inequality and the Coming Chaos


Karen Piper - 2014
    The CEO of Nestlé, purveyor of bottled water, heartily agrees. It is important to give water a market value, he says in a promotional video, so “we're all aware that it has a price.” But for those who have no access to clean water, a fifth of the world's population, the price is thirst. This is the frightening landscape that Karen Piper conducts us through in The Price of Thirst—one where thirst is political, drought is a business opportunity, and more and more of our most necessary natural resource is controlled by multinational corporations.In visits to the hot spots of water scarcity and the hotshots in water finance, Piper shows us what happens when global businesses with mafia-like powers buy up the water supply and turn off the taps of people who cannot pay: border disputes between Iraq and Turkey, a “revolution of the thirsty” in Egypt, street fights in Greece, an apartheid of water rights in South Africa. The Price of Thirst takes us to Chile, the first nation to privatize 100 percent of its water supplies, creating a crushing monopoly instead of a thriving free market in water; to New Delhi, where the sacred waters of the Ganges are being diverted to a private water treatment plant, fomenting unrest; and to Iraq, where the U.S.-mandated privatization of water resources destroyed by our military is further destabilizing the volatile region. And in our own backyard, where these same corporations are quietly buying up water supplies, Piper reveals how “water banking” is drying up California farms in favor of urban sprawl and private towns.The product of seven years of investigation across six continents and a dozen countries, and scores of interviews with CEOs, activists, environmentalists, and climate change specialists, The Price of Thirst paints a harrowing picture of a world out of balance, with the distance between the haves and have-nots of water inexorably widening and the coming crisis moving ever closer.

House Keys Not Handcuffs: Homeless Organizing, Art and Politics in San Francisco and Beyond


Paul Boden, Art Hazelwood, Bob Prentice - 2014
    Its purpose is not only to distill the lessons we have learned, but to encourage others to document and reflect on their own experiences in the hope that we can collectively contribute to a stronger, more broadly-based movement.

Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural India


Bhrigupati Singh - 2014
    Beset by droughts and food shortages in recent years, it is the home of the Sahariyas, former bonded laborers, officially classified as Rajasthan’s only “primitive tribe.” From afar, we might consider this the bleakest of the bleak, but in Poverty and the Quest for Life, Bhrigupati Singh asks us to reconsider just what quality of life means. He shows how the Sahariyas conceive of aspiration, advancement, and vitality in both material and spiritual terms, and how such bridging can engender new possibilities of life. Singh organizes his study around two themes: power and ethics, through which he explores a complex terrain of material and spiritual forces. Authority remains contested, whether in divine or human forms; the state is both despised and desired; high and low castes negotiate new ways of living together, in conflict but also cooperation; new gods move across rival social groups; animals and plants leave their tracks on human subjectivity and religiosity; and the potential for vitality persists even as natural resources steadily disappear. Studying this milieu, Singh offers new ways of thinking beyond the religion-secularism and nature-culture dichotomies, juxtaposing questions about quality of life with political theologies of sovereignty, neighborliness, and ethics, in the process painting a rich portrait of perseverance and fragility in contemporary rural India.

Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City


Laurent Gayer - 2014
    It is also the most violent. Since the mid-1980s, it has endured endemic political conflict and criminal violence, which revolve around control of the city and its resources (votes, landand bhatta-protection money). These struggles for the city have become ethnicized. Karachi, often referred to as a Pakistan in miniature, has become increasingly fragmented, socially as well as territorially.Despite this chronic state of urban political warfare, Karachi is the cornerstone of the economy of Pakistan. Gayer's book is an attempt to elucidate this conundrum. Against journalistic accounts describing Karachi as chaotic and ungovernable, he argues that there is indeed order of a kind in thecity's permanent civil war. Far from being entropic, Karachi's polity is predicated upon organisational, interpretative and pragmatic routines that have made violence manageable for its populations. Whether such ordered disorder is viable in the long term remains to be seen, but for now Karachiworks despite-and sometimes through-violence.

The Poor With Me


Philip E. Johnston - 2014
    The story of their life is written by their patients over years of challenging healthcare interactions. In The Poor With Me, Dr. Johnston has written a fascinating collection of these patient stories told with poignancy, insight, and humor, much in the style of James Herriot in his All Creatures Great and Small series. A career spanning more than forty years in the inner city of Indianapolis provides the background for this extraordinary set of authentic accounts recalling common and uncommon medical vignettes that will resonate not only with healthcare providers but all readers of intriguing stories. From the challenges of managing heart disease complicated by unimaginable risk factors to treating potentially lethal cardiac arrhythmias with limited resources, from treating perplexing parasitic diseases to diagnosing rare skin conditions, the stories ring compellingly true. From routine but unexpected pregnancies to harrowing emergency deliveries in cramped quarters, from laugh-out-loud malapropisms to wrenching psycho-social disasters, The Poor With Me brings to life the authenticity of healthcare amid the numbing reality of poverty. Commentaries on the effect of poverty on individuals, families and the communities of the inner city highlight the insight brought by a lifetime of medical practice in this daunting setting.