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Description
"Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis--that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you...
2) Empire falls
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Miles Roby, called back from college to the small town of Empire Falls in Dexter County, Maine to take care of his ailing mother, falls into a rut that keeps him trapped until years later when a series of revelations and tragedies jolts him back into an awareness of his life.
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"Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh "Shuggie" Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher's war on heavy industry has put husbands and sons out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for his artistic brother and practical sister. She dreams of...
4) Incendiary
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Distraught over the deaths of her husband and son in a suicide bombing at a London soccer match, a woman writes a letter to Osama bin Laden to persuade him to abandon his terror campaign.
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"After sixteen novels, Jacqueline Winspear has taken the bold step of turning to memoir, revealing the hardships and joys of her family history. Both shockingly frank and deftly restrained, her memoir tackles such difficult, poignant, and fascinating family memories as her paternal grandfather's shellshock, her mother's evacuation from London during the Blitz; her soft-spoken animal-loving father's torturous assignment to an explosives team during...
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"The story of the dangerous first love of two young men: Mungo and James. Born under different stars--Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic--they should be sworn enemies if they're to be seen as men at all. Their environment is a hyper-masculine and sectarian one, for gangs of young men and the violence they might dole out dominate the Glaswegian estate where they live. And yet against all odds Mungo and James become best friends as they find a...
7) The jungle
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Series
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1906 best-seller shockingly reveals intolerable labor practices and unsanitary working conditions in the Chicago stockyards as it tells the brutally grim story of a Slavic family that emigrates to America full of optimism but soon descends into numbing poverty, moral degradation, and despair. A fiercely realistic American classic that will haunt readers long after they've finished the last page. Published privately by Sinclair in 1906 after commercial...
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"Orphans Gig and Rye Dolan don't have a penny to their names. The brothers work grueling, odd jobs each day just to secure a meal, and spend nights sleeping wherever they can with other day laborers. Twenty-three-year-old Gig is a passionate union man, fighting for fair pay and calling out the corrupt employers who exploit the working class. Eager to emulate his older brother, Rye follows suit, though he can't quite muster Gig's passion for the cause....
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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
At 28, Stephanie Land's plans of breaking free from the roots of her hometown in the Pacific Northwest to chase her dreams of attending a university and becoming a writer, were cut short when a summer fling turned into an unexpected pregnancy....
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The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement. They were alternately known as "waste people," "offals," "rubbish," "lazy lubbers," and "crackers." By the 1850s, the downtrodden included so-called "clay eaters" and "sandhillers," known for prematurely-aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and listless minds. Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature...
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Lexile measure
1200L
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"A terrifying encounter with an escaped convict in a graveyard on the wild Kent marshes; a summons to meet the bitter, decaying Miss Havisham and her beautiful, cold-hearted ward Estella; the sudden generosity of a mysterious benefactor-these form a series of events that change the orphan Pip's life forever, as he eagerly abandons his humble origins to begin a new life as a gentleman. Dickens's haunting novel depicts Pip's education and development...
14) All my rage
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2023 Youth Media Award Winners
Book Chat June 17: Desert (and Dessert?)
DAML Staff Picks 2023
Green Mountain Book Award 2023-2024
Book Chat June 17: Desert (and Dessert?)
DAML Staff Picks 2023
Green Mountain Book Award 2023-2024
Description
A family extending from Pakistan to California, deals with generations of young love, old regrets, and forgiveness.
Author
Description
Senator Elizabeth Warren has long been an outspoken champion of America's middle class, and by the time the people of Massachusetts elected her in 2012, she had become one of the country's leading progressive voices. Now, at a perilous moment for our nation, she has written a book that is at once an account of how we built the strongest middle class in history, a scathing indictment of those who have spent the past thirty-five years undermining working...
Author
Pub. Date
2004
Edition
First edition
Description
An intimate portrait of poverty-level working families from a range of ethnic backgrounds in America reveals their legacy of low-paying, dead-end jobs, dysfunctional parenting, and substance abuse and charges the government with failing to provide adequate housing, health care, and education. From the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning Arab and Jew, a new book that presents a searing, intimate portrait of working American families struggling against...
Author
Formats
Description
In the early 1970s, Corey Sifter, the son of working-class parents, becomes a yard boy on the grand estate of the powerful Metarey family. Soon, through the family's generosity, he is a student at a private boarding school and an aide to the great New York senator Henry Bonwiller, who is running for president of the United States. Before long, Corey finds himself involved with one of the Metarey daughters as well, and he begins to leave behind the...
Author
Pub. Date
2013.
Edition
First Picador edition.
Description
"After two separate catastrophes, two very different families leave the country for the bright lights of Perth. The Lambs are industrious, united, and--until God seems to turn His back on their boy Fish--religious. The Pickleses are gamblers, boozers, fractious, and unlikely landlords. Change, hardship, and the war force them to swallow their dignity and share a great, breathing, shuddering house called Cloudstreet. Over the next twenty years, they...
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