Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Description
A journalist describes the years she worked in low-paying domestic work under wealthy employers, contrasting the privileges of the upper-middle class to the realities of the overworked laborers supporting them.
Land's plans of breaking free from the roots of her hometown in the Pacific Northwest to chase her dreams were cut short when a summer fling turned into an unexpected pregnancy. She turned to housekeeping to make ends meet, took classes online...
Author
Language
English
Description
"From the beet fields of North Dakota to the National Forest campgrounds of California to Amazon's CamperForce program in Texas, employers have discovered a new, low-cost labor pool, made up largely of transient older Americans. Finding that social security comes up short, often underwater on mortgages, these invisible casualties of the Great Recession have taken to the road by the tens of thousands in late-model RVs, travel trailers, and vans, forming...
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8.5 - AR Pts: 12
Language
English
Formats
Description
Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, the author 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, she left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"The Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a new and bracing argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it. The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and...
Author
Publisher
Greenleaf Book Group Press
Pub. Date
2009, c2010
Language
English
Description
The author, born in Tennessee to an alcoholic father and a battered mother, tells how he fulfilled a promise made to his mother that he would find a way to escape the poverty that had gripped his family for generations.
Author
Pub. Date
2015.
Language
English
Description
"A revelatory account of poverty in America so deep that we, as a country, don't think it exists Jessica Compton's family of four would have no cash income unless she donated plasma twice a week at her local donation center in Tennessee. Modonna Harris and her teenage daughter Brianna in Chicago often have no food but spoiled milk on weekends. After two decades of brilliant research on American poverty, Kathryn Edin noticed something she hadn't seen...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Matt Taibbi's genius is in untangling complex stories and making us care about them by providing striking moral clarity and a genuine sense of outrage. He has become among the most read journalists in America, leading the dialogue with epic Rolling Stone pieces that offer an "almost startling reminder of the power of good writing" (Washington Post). In this new work, he once again takes readers into the biggest, most urgent story in America: a widening...
11) Class: a memoir
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
When Stephanie Land set out to write her memoir Maid, she never could have imagined what was to come. Handpicked by President Barack Obama as one of the best books of 2019, it was called "an eye-opening journey into the lives of the working poor" (People). Later it was adapted into the hit Netflix series Maid, which was viewed by 67 million households and was Netflix's fourth most-watched show in 2021, garnering three Primetime Emmy Award nominations....
Author
Publisher
BenBella Books
Pub. Date
[2021]
Language
English
Description
"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"--
Author
Publisher
The New Press
Pub. Date
[2022]
Language
English
Description
"Many Americans take comfort and convenience for granted. We eat at nice restaurants, order groceries online, and hire nannies to care for kids. Getting Me Cheap is a portrait of the lives of the low-wage workers-primarily women-who make this lifestyle possible. Sociologists Lisa Dodson and Amanda Freeman follow women in the food, health care, home care, and other low-wage industries as they struggle to balance mothering with bad jobs and without...
Author
Publisher
The Dial Press
Pub. Date
[2021]
Language
English
Description
"After an abusive, neglected childhood spent on welfare and in and out of homelessness in Alaska, raised by a mother who believed she was the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary, Carrot Quinn moved out on her own. She found a sense of belonging with a bunch of straight-edge anarchists who taught her how to traverse the country by freight trains, sleep in fields under the stars, and find her food by foraging in dumpsters. Her new life was one of thrilling...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"When Stephanie Land set out to write her memoir Maid, she never could have imagined what was to come. Maid was a story about a housecleaner, but it was also a story about a woman with a dream. In Class, Land takes us with her as she finishes college and pursues her writing career. Facing barriers at every turn including a byzantine loan system, not having enough money for food, navigating the judgments of professors and fellow students who didn't...
Interlibrary Loan Request
Didn't find what you need? Items not owned by Des Moines Public Library can be requested from other libraries to be delivered to your local library for pickup.
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? If the item was published recently, submit a purchase suggestion. Submit Request