Books
A Framework for Understanding Poverty
Alabama in the Twentieth Century
Alabama is a state full of contrasts. On the one hand, it has elected the lowest number of women to the state legislature of any state in the union; yet according to historians it produced two of the ten most important American women of the 20th century–Helen Keller and Rosa Parks. Its people are fanatically devoted to conservative religious values; yet they openly idolize tarnished football programs as the source of their heroes. Citizens who are puzzled by Alabama’s maddening resistance to change or its incredibly strong sense of tradition and community will find important clues and new understanding within these pages.
All over but the Shoutin’
This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up 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. But 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.
All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America?, Joel Berg, 2008
As Certain as Death: A Fifty-State Survey of State and Local Tax Laws
As Certain as Death surveys the most important details of income, property, general and selective sales, corporate income, and other tax laws for each of the fifty states. The book also discusses how the tax burden is allocated among the poor, middle classes, and wealthy. It provides a picture of each state’s tax and revenue sources, public school funding, and other characteristics, including population, race, religious affiliation, family income and poverty statistics, and major industries. In addition to providing a reasonable level of detail that reveals the state’s strengths and weaknesses, the five categories presenting these details foster meaningful comparisons between the states. This book is an important tool for evaluating state policies from a fairness perspective; it will also be helpful to educators and others in both private and government sectors who are interested in business, investment, multi-jurisdictional, and education issues, as well as geographical trends addressing population, race, religion, and poverty.
Blessed Are the Poor?: Women’s Poverty, Family Policy, and Practical Theology
The decade of the ’80s saw a growing rift between the rich and the poor in the United States. Poverty increased among women with children–the so-called “female-headed family”–more rapidly than among any other population group. Couture’s work argues that the tradition of self-sufficiency has contributed to the growth of women’s poverty, and instead supports a policy of interdependence.
Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter: A Memoir
Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter is a haunting and ultimately triumphant memoir about growing up poor and undaunted in the South. With an unflinching voice, Barbara Robinette Moss chronicles her family’s chaotic, impoverished survival in the red-clay hills of Alabama. A wild-eyed, alcoholic father and a humble, heroic mother along with a shanty full of rambunctious brothers and sisters fill her life to the brim with stories that are gripping, tender, and funny. Moss’s early fascination with art coincides with her desire to transform her “twisted mummy face,” which grew askew due to malnutrition and lack of medical care. Gazing at the stars on a clear Alabama night, she wishes to be the “goddess of beauty, much-loved daughter of Zeus.” Against all odds, the image of herself surfaces at last as she learns to believe in the beauty she brings forth from inside.
Child Poverty and Inequality: Securing a Better Future for America’s Children
Grace at the Table: Ending Hunger in God’s World
For Communities to Work, David Mathews, 2002
Inside Alabama: A Personal History of My State, Harvey Jackson, 2004
The Least of These: Fair Taxes and the Moral Duty of Christians, Susan Pace Hamill, 2003
Susan Pace Hamill’s thesis and related writings about a grassroots tax revolution, including an unabridged version of her pamphlet An Argument for Tax Reform Based on Judeo-Christian Ethics.
Listen to Me Good: The Story of an Alabama Midwife
An inspiring and engaging oral history of a wise woman who truly understands the value of life.
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
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. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a WalMart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly “unskilled”, that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. This insightful book reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity – a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich’s perspective and for a rare view of how “prosperity” looks from the bottom. You will never see anything – from a motel bathroom to a restaurant meal – in quite the same way again.
The Other America: Poverty in the United States
Harrington’s classic account of an isolated and self-perpetuating underclass.
Poor but Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites
Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage
Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools
National Book Award-winning author Jonathan Kozol presents his shocking account of the American educational system in this stunning New York Times bestseller.
The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America
Over the past several years, Jonathan Kozol has visited nearly 60 public schools. Virtually everywhere, he finds that conditions have grown worse for inner-city children in the 15 years since federal courts began dismantling the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. First, a state of nearly absolute apartheid now prevails in thousands of our schools. The segregation of black children has reverted to a level that the nation has not seen since 1968. Few of the students in these schools know white children any longer. Second, a protomilitary form of discipline has now emerged, modeled on stick-and-carrot methods of behavioral control traditionally used in prisons but targeted exclusively at black and Hispanic children. And third, as high-stakes testing takes on pathological and punitive dimensions, liberal education in our inner-city schools has been increasingly replaced by culturally barren and robotic methods of instruction that would be rejected out of hand by schools that serve the mainstream of society. Filled with the passionate voices of children and their teachers and some of the most revered and trusted leaders in the black community, “The Shame of the Nation is a triumph of firsthand reporting that pays tribute to those undefeated educators who persist against the odds, but directly challenges the chilling practices now being forced upon our urban systems by the Bush administration. In their place, Kozol offers a humane, dramatic challenge to our nation to fulfill at last the promise made some 50 years ago to all our youngest citizens.
Under Siege: Life for Low Income Latinos in the South, Mary Bauer, 2009
Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America
The Working Poor: Invisible in America
Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America
Over five years, sociologist Cynthia Duncan visited remote rural areas across the U.S. and conducted 350 in-depth interviews with residents to unravel the ways in which poverty is perpetuated and what can be done to alleviate the problem.