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.

"Fifty years after Michael Harrington published his groundbreaking book The Other America, in which he chronicled the lives of people excluded from the Age of Affluence, poverty in America is back with a vengeance. It is made up of both the long-term chronically poor and new working poor-the tens of millions of victims of a broken economy and an ever more dysfunctional political system. In many ways, for the majority of Americans, financial insecurity...

"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...

The income gap in America has been blamed on everything from computers to immigration, but its causes and consequences call for a patient, non-partisan exploration. Noah explains not only how this "Great Divergence" has come about, but why it threatens American democracy--and most important, how we can begin to reverse it.

"Three of the nation's top scholars, known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America, turn their attention from the country's poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that America's most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice. Instead, nearly all are rural. Little if any attention has been paid to these places or to the people who make their lives there....

"This book gives voice to the 57 million Americans--including 21 percent of the nation's children--who are sandwiched between poor and middle class. While government programs help the needy and politicians woo the more fortunate, the 'Missing Class' is largely invisible and ignored. Through the experiences of nine families, sociologists Newman and Chen trace the unique problems faced by individuals in this large and growing demographic--the 'near...

"A collection of compelling, hard-hitting first-person essays, poems, and photos that expose what our punitive social systems do to so many Americans. Going for Broke, edited by Alissa Quart, Executive Director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and David Wallis, former Managing Director of EHRP, gives voice to a range of gifted writers for whom "economic precarity" is more than just another assignment. All illustrate what the late Barbara...