"So all your friends are working spiffy jobs, making beautiful babies (or thinking about it), inviting you to fabulous parties, and all you're making is this month's rent. (Barely.) In Brokenomics: 50 Ways to Live the Dream on a Dime, author Dina Gachman shares the lessons she's learned about how to live large in the cheap seats. Through stories both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny that any hardworking stiff can relate to, Dina reveals all...

"Early in the twentieth century, drawing upon the hundreds of letters written to his father by immigrants from Mecklenburg, Germany, Johannes Gillhoff created the archetypal character of Jürnjakob Swehn: the upright, honest mench who personified the German immigrant. This farmer-hero--planting and harvesting his Iowa acres, joking with his neighbors during the snowy winters, building a church with his own hands--proved so popular with the German...