All Over but the Shoutin’

All over but the shoutin

Title: All Over but the Shoutin’

Author: Rick Bragg

Published: 1998

From the publisher’s website:

This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. It is the story of Bragg’s father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the habit of running out on the people who needed him most…at the center of this soaring memoir is Bragg’s mother, who went eighteen years without a new dress so that her sons could have school clothes and picked other people’s cotton so that her children wouldn’t have to live on welfare alone. Evoking these lives–and the country that shaped and nourished them–with artistry, honesty, and compassion, Rick Bragg brings home the love and suffering that lie at the heart of every family. The result is unforgettable.

Available on Amazon.

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Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America

Nickel and Dimed

Title: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

Author: Barbara Ehrenreich

Published: 2011

From the publisher’s website:

Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job — any job — can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered.

Available on Amazon.

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Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

Kozol_Amazing Grace

Title: Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

Author: Jonathan Kozol

Published: 1995

Book Summary:

From the author’s website:

Amazing Grace is Jonathan Kozol’s classic book on life and death in the South Bronx—the poorest urban neighborhood of the United States. He brings us into overcrowded schools, dysfunctional hospitals, and rat-infested homes where families have been ravaged by depression and anxiety, drug-related violence, and the spread of AIDS. But he also introduces us to devoted and unselfish teachers, dedicated ministers, and—at the heart and center of the book—courageous and delightful children. The children we come to meet through the friendships they have formed with Jonathan defy the stereotypes of urban youth too frequently presented by the media.

Available on Amazon.

Book Cover Image Source: Amazon