"[The author] takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the 20 dollars a month she has left after paying for their rundown apartment. Scott is a gentle nurse consumed by a heroin addiction. Lamar, a man with no legs and a neighborhood full of boys to look after, tries to work his way out of debt. Vanetta participates in a botched stickup...

"I've been waiting for this book for a long time. Well, not this book, because I never imagined that the book I was waiting for would be so devastatingly smart and funny, so consistently entertaining and unflinchingly on target. In fact, I would like to have written it myself - if, that is, I had lived Linda Tirado's life and extracted all the hard lessons she has learned. I am the author of Nickel and Dimed, which tells the story of my own brief...

"A unique and riveting exploration of one of America's largest and fastest-growing industries--the business of poverty"--Provided by publisher.

At 28, Stephanie Land's plans of breaking free from the roots of her hometown in the Pacific Northwest to chase her dreams of attending a university and becoming a writer, were cut short when a summer fling turned into an unexpected pregnancy. She turned to housekeeping to make ends meet, and with a tenacious grip on her dream to provide her daughter the very best life possible, Stephanie worked days and took classes online to earn a college degree,...

"Everything you know about income inequality, poverty and other measures of economic well-being in America is wrong. In measuring income inequality, poverty and other indexes of well-being our government does not count two-thirds of all transfer payments that are received or any of the taxes paid. When we get our facts straight poverty has virtually been eliminated, income inequality is lower than it was in 1947 and America is still the great land...

"Joanne Samuel Goldblum, CEO and founder of the National Diaper Bank Network, and Colleen Shaddox, a journalist and activist, give a book shedding light on the realities faced by those living in poverty across the United States and provide a road map for eradicating poverty via policy changes"--

"From the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times-bestselling coauthor of Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, candid reflections on the economist's craft. When economist Angus Deaton immigrated to the United States from Britain in the early 1980s, he was awed by America's strengths and shocked by the extraordinary gaps he witnessed between people. Economics in America explains in clear terms how the field of economics addresses...

Decades of cuts to local government amidst rising concentrations of poverty have wreaked havoc on communities left behind by the modern economy. Some of these discarded places are rural. Others are big cities, small cities, or historic suburbs. Some vote blue, others red. Some are the most diverse communities in America, while others are nearly all white, all Latino, or all Black. All are routinely trashed by outsiders for their poverty and their...