Rural Poverty

Based on a remarkable true story. Winter, 1969. Since she was a little girl, Catarina learned not to ask for much. Born to a family of corn farmers in rural south Brazil, she was happiest when she was surrounded by sprawling fields and burly, familial farmhands—until her family was driven out of the land they had worked diligently for years, and Catarina was sent to work for a wealthy family in São Paolo. Only ten years old, Catarina becomes a housemaid—and the lifeline of her family. Far from everyone and everything she’d ever known, she discovers the shocking gap between her life ...

The 1965 film Poverty in Rural America by the U.S. Department of Agriculture offers a documentary portrait of impoverished rural communities across the United States during the early years of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s "War on Poverty." The film highlights the economic and social hardships faced by families in isolated regions, including Appalachia, the rural South, Native American reservations, and agricultural areas in the Southwest.

In the parish of St. Bruno, sex is easy, corruption festers, and double-dealing is a way of life—and Rene Shade is an uncompromising detective swimming in a sea of filth in this hard-hitting, critically acclaimed trilogy of crime novels. As Shade takes on hit men, porn kings, a gang of ex-cons...

This classic southern noir follows the seemingly dim-witted small-town sherriff Nick Corey as his bid for re-election takes him down a path of lies, manipulation, and deception. Nick Corey is a terrible sheriff on purpose. He doesn't solve problems, enforce rules or arrest criminals. He knows...

The Dust Bowl sweeps a handsome stranger into a small Colorado town to dangerous effect "...exhilarating and hard to resist." —The Washington Post on Westering Women 1937. It’s been seven years since the dust storms started in Colorado. Folks can barely remember a time when the clouds were...

A gothic novel set in the fictional village of Savilestowe, England, spanning the late 19th and early 20th century. "Shattered Shadows" presents a poignant story set against the gloomy backdrop of a declining village, spotlighting the struggle and courage of the Mendellson family, particularly the protagonist Ashley Mendellson, as she grapples with the challenge of salvaging their derelict farmstead, Applecroft, from the clutches of financial ruin and personal despair.The tale delves into the lives of Ashley and her sister Carly, their daunting task of maintaining the household and the farm...

Riveting, powerful, and a little bit magical, Fault Lines offers readers a slow-burn romance alongside an unflinching examination of socio-economics, gender expectations, and environmental ethics. Gold Winner of the 2024 Nautilus Book Award for Young Adult (YA) Fiction Ever since her aunt died...

Bobi Conn was raised in a remote Kentucky holler in 1980s Appalachia. She remembers her tin-roofed house tucked away in a vast forest paradise; the sparkling creeks, with their frogs and crawdads; the sweet blackberries growing along the road to her granny’s; and her abusive father. An elegiac account of survival despite being born poor, female, and cloistered, Bobi’s testament is one of hope for all vulnerable populations, particularly women and girls caught in the cycle of poverty and abuse.

A sharp and funny addition to Daniel Woodrell's collection of "country noir" novels, featuring anti-hero Sammy Barlach and Jamalee Merridew, her hair tomato red with rage and ambition. In the Ozarks, what you are is where you are born. If you're born in Venus Holler, you're not much. For Jamalee...

In one of the poorest parts of rural New Hampshire, teenage girls have been disappearing, snatched from back country roads, never to be seen alive again. For 17-year-old Marjorie Richards, the fear raised by these abductions is the backdrop to what she lives with in her own home, every day. Marjorie has been raised by parents so intentionally isolated from normal society that they have developed their own dialect, a kind of mountain hybrid of English that displays both their ignorance of and disdain for the wider world.

In this dark, southern noir, a writer drifting through life escapes his failed marriage and back to his family home in the Ozarks where he finds himself in the middle of a blood feud between his own family and the brutal Dolly clan. “My imagination is always skulking about in a wrong place.”...

From an American master and author of Winter's Bone, this dark tragedy tells of a deadly dance hall fire and its impact over several generations. Alma DeGeer Dunahew, the mother of three young boys, works as the maid for a prominent citizen and his family in West Table, Missouri. Her husband is...

Worn out by poverty, Lettie Radley and her miner husband Tommy grasp at the offer of their very own smallholding - part of a Government scheme to put the unemployed back to work on the land. When she comes down to Essex to join him, it's not Tommy who greets her, but their new neighbours. Overbearing and unkempt, Jean and Adam Dell are everything that Lettie can't abide. But as Lettie settles in, she finds an unexpected joy in the rhythms of life. She's hopeful that her past, and the terrible secret Tommy has come to Foxash to escape, are far behind them. But the Dells have their own secrets.

This final chapter in Daniel Woolrell's Ozark trilogy peels the lid back on a dysfunctional Missouri family as infidelity threatens to consume their world in violence and terror. Shug Akins is a lonely, overweight thirteen-year-old boy. His mother, Glenda, is the one person who loves him—she...

When a young mother's crisis sparked a movement that has the ptential to serves 2,600+ people annually at just $8.50 per person—proving rural communities can solve complex problems with remarkable efficiency and authentic compassion. In the hills of rural West Virginia, Clarissa Tallman faced every parent's nightmare: her infant son needed specialized formula that wasn't available locally, and the stress of trying to meet this basic need threatened to overwhelm her family. What happened next challenges everything we think we know about effective social services and rural capacity. Instead...

In the recent years, people have studied the unusual increase in the number of prime-aged men who are unemployed. According to Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist who holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute, the drop of the share of prime-aged men in the labor market in other prosperous democracies has never been as severe as it is in the United States.

The Chinese Economic miracle is happening despite, not because of, China's 900 million peasants. They are missing from the portraits of booming Shanghai, or Beijing. Many of China's underclass live under a feudalistic system unchanged since the 15th century. Wu Chuntao and Chen Guidi undertook a three-year survey of what had happened to the peasants in one of the poorest provinces, Anhui, asking the question: have the peasants been betrayed by the revolution undertaken in their name by Mao and his successors?

In this Very Short Introduction, Philip N. Jefferson explores how the answers to these questions lie in the social, political, economic, educational, and technological processes that impact all of us throughout our lives. The degree of vulnerability is all that differentiates us. He shows how a person's level of vulnerability to adverse changes in their life is very much dependent on the circumstances of their birth, including where their family lived, whether it was peacetime or wartime, whether they had access to clean water, and whether they are male or female.

Professional distance runners Elvin Kibet and Shadrack Kipchirchir grew up in rural Kenyan villages. Though their lives began in poverty, both were driven to reach their full potential, to gain an education, and make a difference. And they would find their way to do just that through the high-pressure world of distance running.

"De Ocampo's performance is admirable. It is well paced, and he employs voices and strategic pauses to good effect. In sum, both the writing and narration are first-class." - AudioFile Magazine An eye-opening investigation of America’s rural and suburban housing crisis, told through a searing...