Urban Poverty

Dr. CJ Patterson returns to her Alabama hometown when her estranged sister, Shelley, is found murdered in the woods. For CJ it means diving headfirst into a painful life she left behind. CJ reluctantly partners with Detective Kevin Braddock, and the complicated romantic history they share is far from over. They soon zero in on Shelley’s abusive ex-boyfriend and a local crime boss who controls the struggling mill village’s illicit enterprises. But anyone is suspect in a town with so many secrets. Even Shelley died with a few of her own.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a “provocative and compelling” (NPR) argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it. A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The New...

A New York Times Best Seller "Essential reading for all adults who work with black and brown young people...Filled with exceptional intellectual sophistication and necessary wisdom for the future of education."—Imani Perry, National Book Award Winner author of South To America An award-winning...

From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, even economic growth. Davis portrays a vast humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy. He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is a wholly original development unforeseen by either classical Marxism or neoliberal theory. Are the great slums, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, volcanoes waiting to erupt?

"Blacks are 13% but commit half of the crime!" Using statistics, facts, charts, arguments never heard before, and common sense, this book factually challenges many firmly held beliefs, such as “Blacks make up 13% of the population but commit half of the violent crimes.” Offering a comprehensive examination of street crime in America's inner cities, it navigates diverse topics with clarity. Drawing from various disciplines, the author explores how mental illness, systemic racism, black apathy, drugs, family breakdown, American values, and the financial gains from illicit activities fuel ...

Deshaun James is dying in his sleep, and the only person who seems to know it is his six-year-old son. Night after night, Josiah jolts awake the moment Deshaun stops breathing, screaming his father back to life before silence can finish what poverty, stress, and neglect already started. But no one outside the home sees a little boy trying to save his dad. They see a “troubled” child, a struggling Black family, and a father whose old aggravated assault record makes him easy to judge and even easier to condemn. With eviction closing in and bills swallowing everything Mekayla earns, the ...

Victorian Poverty Was Not Chaos. It Was Arithmetic. Beyond the myths of Jack the Ripper and Charles Dickens lies the brutal, mechanical reality of the London Underworld. You’ve read the novels. You’ve walked the gaslit streets in your imagination. But what did survival actually cost in the East End? How much did you pay for eight hours of sleep on a stretched rope? How many calories sustained a workhouse inmate? What did it mean to raise a family inside a single, airless room in a rookery? The stories are familiar. The numbers are not. In The Victorian Rookery: The Economic Reality of ...

Dark Is the Night follows a cast of drifters, addicts, and lost souls scraping by on the fringes—moving from bar to bar, bed to bed, one bad decision at a time. Their stories unfold in cheap rooms and darker places, where connection is fleeting and escape is an illusion. This is raw, unsentimental fiction that doesn’t look away.

The children we meet through the deepening friendships that evolve between Janathan Kozol and their families defy the stereotypes of urban youth too frequently presented on TV and in newspapers. Tender, generous, and often religiously devout, they speak with painful clarity about the poverty and racial isolation that have wounded but not hardened them. "It's not like being in a jail," says 15-year-old Isabel. "It's more like being hidden."

When Rodney Mason, an ex-con drug dealer from Newark's rough South Ward, was shot and paralyzed, he vowed to turn his life around. A former high-school pitching ace with a 93-mph fastball, Mason decided to form a Little League team to help boys avoid the street life that had claimed his youth and mobility. Predictably, the players struggle but through the fists and tears, lopsided losses and rare victories, this bunch of misfits becomes a team, and in doing so gives the community something to root for.

Piven and Cloward have updated their classic work on the history and function of welfare to cover the American welfare state's massive erosion during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years. The authors present a boldly comprehensive, brilliant new theory to explain the comparative underdevelopment of the US welfare state among advanced industrial nations. Their conceptual framework promises to shape the debate within current and future administrations as they attempt to rethink the welfare system and its role in American society.

As a child you see the world through innocent eyes. You enjoy your childhood because you’re not aware of the dangers the world around you hold. The drunk man sitting by the side of the road is just a drunk man, he’s not an alcoholic who’s wasted his life because you don’t know what an alcoholic is. The men who knock on the door all the time to see your mum are just her friends who like to give her money. There’s nothing wrong with that. As time passes that innocence is stripped away, for some it happens quicker than others. Forced to grow up in a world where the actions of your ...

"The People of the Abyss" (1903) is a work by Jack London about life in the East End of London in 1902. He wrote this first-hand account after living in the East End (including the Whitechapel District) for several months, sometimes staying in workhouses or sleeping on the streets. The conditions he experienced and wrote about, were the same as those endured by an estimated 500,000 of the contemporary London poor.

What if the story of one country could unlock the secrets of our shared human journey? From the depths of the Amazon to the heights of political upheaval, Brazil is not just a nation—it’s a mirror. A mirror that reflects colonization and resistance, slavery and survival, empire and reinvention. In The History of Brazil, Eleanor Whitcombe invites you into a sweeping, emotionally resonant exploration of a land where contradictions collide and transformation never stops. ✔ Discover how a Portuguese outpost became the seat of a European empire ✔ Uncover the brutal logic behind the ...

"Haunting, intimate, and beautifully told: a magical debut novel from a writer to watch.” —Emily M. Danforth, national bestselling and award-winning author of The Miseducation of Cameron Post A spellbinding young adult fantasy debut by Riss M. Neilson following three best friends who turn to...

Lady is forced to grow up fast when she and her siblings are abandoned by their drug-addicted mother. Raised by their grandparents, they were taught the values of life and responsibility in Newark, NJ.Her first love, Jungle, introduced her to the streets, love, and every part of the game until his untimely disappearance. Boogie, Reek, and Blackjack look out for Lady as she is forced to survive the escalating violence around her. With the streets saying that Blackjack and his brother Ripper had set Jungle up, Boogie and Reek put together a murderous plot to get revenge. As the bodies stack ...

Professor Challenger loudly proclaims before all of his friends at 221, “Christmas is a myth. There is no such thing as a Santa ClauseIt that comes to the rescue of little children, n bring some candy and treats and coal for the ones that are naughty not nice. Holmes, gazing out over Baker Street at the snow falling and the pale moon overhead, quietly says, I wouldn't be so sure of that. Challenger, Not one to take doubt light, says "I WILL prove it's a myth!" Oh, poor Challenger, is he in for a ride on Christmas night!

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption.

Mathieu vit dans la rue. Il l’a choisi. Ce n’est pas un aventurier, et ça n’a rien à voir avec la liberté. Est-ce qu’il s’autodétruit? Est-ce ainsi qu’il se préserve? Peu importe. Sa chienne Sam est là, qui l’aide à continuer. Mais quand elle disparaît, Mathieu doit mettre fin à son errance. Pour la retrouver, il entreprend un voyage dont les bifurcations le ramènent au secret de son passé.

White Americans have long been comfortable in the assumption that they are the cultural norm. Now that notion is being challenged, as white people wrestle with what it means to be part of a fast-changing, truly multicultural nation. Facing chronic economic insecurity, a popular culture that reflects the nation’s diverse cultural reality, a future in which they will no longer constitute the majority of the population, and with a Black president in the White House, whites are growing anxious.