Central Kansas Library System

"When Ada Calhoun found herself in the throes of a midlife crisis, she thought that she had no right to complain. She was married with children and a good career. So why did she feel miserable? And why did it seem that other Generation X women were miserable, too? Calhoun decided to find some answers. She looked into housing costs, HR trends, credit card debt averages, and divorce data. At every turn, she saw a pattern: sandwiched between the Boomers...

Vance, a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, provides an account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. 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. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like...

The financial meltdown from the perspective of a number of players: Michael Burry, a bizarre autistic-like stock-picking genius, and the first to realize that the market's housing boom is based on a "house of cards" sham; Mark Baum, self-loathing fictional character whose firm picks up insider trading information from a wrong number phone call; Jarred Vennet, a smart-aleck broker who confirms the ominous suspicion; and Charles Gellar and James Shipley,...

Nick and Phoebe Maguire, in search of a fresh start for themselves and their infant son, move cross-country to Southern California, arriving at the worst possible economic time. Instead of a beachside home, they find themselves broke, trapped, and increasingly desperate in the dark heart of foreclosure alley. Nick and Phoebe each devise their own plan to claw their way back into the middle class and beyond. Hatched under one roof, their two separate,...

The plow that broke the plains" depicts the social and economic history of the Great Plains from the settlement of the prairies by cattlemen and farmers through the World War I boom to drought and depression. "The river" traces life in the Mississippi River Valley during the previous 150 years, showing the consequences of sharecropping, soil exhaustion, unchecked erosion and floods, and concludes with scenes of regional planning, TVA development and...