Poverty & Homelessness

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis - that of white working-class Americans....

The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy....

In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they each struggle to keep a roof over their heads....

Through the unforgettable stories of five Atlanta families, this landmark work of journalism exposes a new and troubling trend—the dramatic rise of the “working homeless” in cities across America

Poverty is much more than simply a lack of material resources, and it takes much more than donations and handouts to solve it....

After Jim O’Connell graduated from Harvard Medical School and was nearing the end of his residency at Massachusetts General, the hospital’s chief of medicine made a proposal....

A raw, heart-wrenching essay about navigating motherhood and poverty, and the hope and resolve needed to find a way forward, by the New York Times bestselling author of Maid and Class.

In this breathtaking book by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels....

At 28, Stephanie Land's dreams of attending a university and becoming a writer quickly dissolved when a summer fling turned into an unplanned pregnancy. Before long, she found herself a single mother, scraping by as a housekeeper to make ends meet....

Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II, a leading advocate for the rights of the poor. addresses in White Poverty, a hugely neglected subject that just might provide the key to mitigating racism and bringing together tens of millions of working class and impoverished Americans.

The crime-infested intersection of West Fayette and Monroe Streets is well-known - and cautiously avoided - by most of Baltimore. But this notorious corner's 24-hour open-air drug market provides the economic fuel for a dying neighborhood....

A critically acclaimed #1 New York Times bestseller with more than one million copies in print and a major motion picture! Gritty with pain, betrayal, and brutality, this incredible true story also shines with an unexpected, life-changing love....

Colburn and Aldern seek to explain the substantial regional variation in rates of homelessness in cities across the United States. In a departure from many analytical approaches, the authors shift their focus from the individual experiencing homelessness to the metropolitan area....

Andrea Elliott follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani, a girl whose imagination is as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn shelter, weaving the story of her childhood with the history of her ancestors, tracing their passage from slavery to the Great Migration north....

A notorious movement cloaked in secrecy. A prosperous Black family that rose from the ashes of American slavery. A forgotten boy. And a daring escape.

With a view through an economic lens that has only become sharper and more focused since its initial publication in 1995, the premise owned by A Framework for Understanding Poverty is unchanged....

Even as climate change dominates the headlines, many of us still think about it in the future tense—we imagine that as global warming worsens over the coming decades, millions of people will scatter around the world, fleeing famine and rising seas.

In her extraordinary best seller, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc immerses listeners in the intricacies of the ghetto, revealing the true sagas lurking behind the headlines of gangsta glamour….

Teeth takes listeners on a disturbing journey into America's silent epidemic of oral disease, exposing the hidden connections between tooth decay and stunted job prospects....

Kevin Fagan’s The Lost and the Found, set in San Francisco—one of the wealthiest cities in America—takes an empathic, character-driven approach to exploring the human side of what’s behind the homelessness epidemic.

The poor die sooner. Blacks die sooner. And poor urban Blacks die sooner than almost all other Americans....

During Sarah Smarsh’s turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the forces of cyclical poverty and the country’s changing economic policies solidified her family’s place among the working poor....

As the middle of five kids growing up in dire poverty, the odds were low on Katriona O'Sullivan making anything of her life. Poor is the extraordinary story - moving, funny, brave, and sometimes startling - of how Katriona turned her life around....

An indictment of America's housing policy, Excluded reveals the social engineering underlying our segregation by economic class, the social and political fallout that result, and what we can do about it....

Sixty percent of humanity - some four-point-three billion people - live in debilitating poverty. The standard development narrative suggests that alleviating poverty in poor countries is a matter of getting the internal policies right....