Showing titles in Poverty & Homelessness

Progress and Poverty by Henry George explores the paradox of increasing inequality in periods of economic growth. George proposes that land speculation is the root cause of wealth disparities, advocating for a single tax on land value to promote fairness and reduce poverty. This influential work is critical for understanding economic and social theories regarding land reform and taxation.

Christophe Guilluy, a French geographer, makes the case that France has become an "American society" - one that is both increasingly multicultural and increasingly unequal. The divide between the global economy's winners and losers in today's France has replaced the old left-right split, leaving many on "the periphery".

Little Jeff Pearce grew up in a postwar Liverpool slum. His father lived the life of an affluent gentleman whilst his mother was forced to steal bread to feed her starving children. Life was tough, and from the moment Jeff could walk he learned to go door to door, begging rags from the rich, which he sold down the markets. Leaving school at the age of 14, he embarked on an extraordinary journey and found himself, before the age of 30, a millionaire. Then, after a cruel twist of fate left him penniless, he, his wife and his children were forced out of their beautiful home.

The New Breadline is a call to action on the issues of food aid, food security and climate justice, told from the frontlines of hunger. Jean-Martin Bauer eloquently dissects inequity and racism in the humanitarian system, drawing on his Haitian childhood and his career as an aid worker, asking: when decisions about food are being made, who isn't at the table?

Examinando retórica, normas políticas, literatura popular y las teorías científicas a lo largo de 400 años, Nacny Isenberg rechaza las suposiciones sobre la sociedad libre de clases de Estados Unidos, donde la libertad y el trabajo duro te garantizan una verdadera movilidad social. Los blancos pobres miserables y sin tierra han existido desde la época del primer asentamiento colonial británico hasta los actuales "hillbillies".

Named after Mahatma Gandhi's phrase for the schools of pre-colonial India, The Beautiful Tree recounts Tooley's journey from the largest shanty town in Africa to the hinterlands of Gansu, China. It introduces listeners to the families and teachers who taught him that the poor are not waiting for educational handouts. They are building their own schools and educating themselves.

What secrets do the Las Vegas storm drains keep? What discoveries wait in the dark? What's beneath the neon? Armed with a flashlight, tape recorder, and expandable baton, Las Vegas CityLife writer-editor Matthew O'Brien explored the Las Vegas flood-control system for more than four years. Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas chronicles O'Brien's adventures in subterranean Vegas. He follows the footsteps of a psycho killer. He braces against a flood. He parties with naked crack-heads.

New chapters on the brain, intersectionality, and parents. Simple, proven strategies that schools can start using today. 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: Middle-class understandings of children and adults in poverty are often ill-suited for connecting with people in poverty and helping them build up the resources to rise out of poverty and into self-sufficiency.

While the world has made encouraging strides in the fight against global poverty, there is a hidden crisis silently undermining our best efforts to help the poor. It is a plague of everyday violence. Beneath the surface of the world’s poorest communities, common violence—like rape, forced labor, illegal detention, land theft, police abuse and other brutality—has become routine and relentless. And like a horde of locusts devouring everything in their path, the unchecked plague of violence ruins lives, blocks the road out of poverty, and undercuts development.

With stark poignancy and political dispassion, Tightrope draws us deep into an "other America". The authors tell this story, in part, through the lives of some of the children with whom Kristof grew up in rural Yamhill, Oregon, an area that prospered for much of the 20th century but has been devastated in the last few decades as blue-collar jobs disappeared. About one-quarter of the children on Kristof's old school bus died in adulthood from drugs, alcohol, suicide, or reckless accidents.

«Conocemos el hambre, estamos acostumbrados al hambre: sentimos hambre dos, tres veces al día. No hay nada más frecuente, más constante, más presente en nuestras vidas que el hambre–y, al mismo tiempo, para muchos de nosotros, nada más lejano que el hambreverdadera.» Para entenderlo, para contarlo, Martín Caparrós recorrió la geografía del hambre, desde la India, Bangladesh, Níger, Kenia y Sudán hasta naciones desarrolladas como Estados Unidos y España.

Who is the richest person in the world, ever? Does where you were born affect how much money you'll earn over a lifetime? How would we know? Why, beyond the idle curiosity, do these questions even matter? In The Haves and the Have-Nots, Branko Milanovic, one of the world's leading experts on wealth, poverty, and the gap that separates them, explains these and other mysteries of how wealth is unevenly spread throughout our world, now and through time.

"There are children in Holbeck without crayons. Living in a city with an opera company. An opera company paid for with money from all of us. Until everyone has crayons, no one gets opera. That’s what I believe." A deeply moving memoir of how a group of artists fed their local community during the COVID pandemic. When crisis hits and audiences stay home, what’s the most useful thing a theater company can do? The answer was to become a food bank and one-stop help shop for those in need. In 15 months, Slung Low would go on to deliver over 15,000 food parcels.

Thousands of people live in the subway, railroad, and sewage tunnels that form the bowels of New York City. This audiobook is about them, the so-called mole people, living alone and in communities, in subway tunnels, and below subway platforms. It is about how and why people move underground, who they are, and what they have to say about their lives and the "topside" world they've left behind.

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, low educational achievement, social mobility, and the troubling state of our public health.

As an adult, I learned this: persist. Work hard. Face rejection, weather the setbacks, until you meet the gatekeeper who will open a door for you. Jesmyn Ward grew up in a poor, rural community in Mississippi. Today, as the first woman to win the National Book Award twice, she is celebrated as one of America’s greatest living writers. Navigate Your Stars is a stirring reflection on the value of hard work and the importance of respect for oneself and others.

On any given night, more than half a million Americans and Canadians find themselves sleeping on the streets, in shelters, cars, and other places not meant for human habitation. Yet as this crisis continues to grow, it remains one of the least talked about—especially in churches. Kevin Nye introduces listeners to the Christ he’s met in tents, shelters, and drop-in centers. He demystifies homelessness by journeying into complex issues like affordable housing, mental illness, addiction, and more, while reimagining our theological approach to these matters.

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. What we often don’t realize is that the consequences of climate change are already visible, right here in the United States. In communities across the country, climate disasters are pushing thousands of people away from their homes.

A holiday classic by Charles Dickens. Originally published in 1843, Dickens worried about the disparity between the wealthy and the impoverished, and it was his attempt to bring this disparity into the light of day, to appeal to the die-hard capitalists to take care of the downtrodden masses. Since this inequity continues, this story is still popular, and will probably continue to be so for the foreseeable future.

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to How the Other Half Lives and learn about the conditions of abject poverty that the residents of the slums of New York at the end of the 19th century had to endure.