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A classic early example of "muck-racking" journalism, or reporting by reform-minded American journalists who attacked established institutions and leaders as corrupt, "How the Other Half Lives" is a chronicle of the conditions of abject poverty that the residents of the slums of New York endured at the end of the 19th century. Danish immigrant Jacob A. Riis saw first-hand the horrible conditions of the Lower East Side of Manhattan following his immigration...
4) Tobacco road
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English
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The classic novel of a Georgia family undone by the Great Depression: “[A] story of force and beauty” (New York Post). Even before the Great Depression struck, Jeeter Lester and his family were desperately poor sharecroppers. But when hard times begin to affect the families that once helped support them, the Lesters slip completely into the abyss. Rather than hold on to each other for support, Jeeter, his wife Ada, and...
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After her farm for widows and orphans is devastated by fire in 1884, Christina Willems is determined to reopen it despite opposition. She finds an unlikely ally in local lumber mill owner Levi Johnson. Having been hurt by people in the past, Levi prefers solitude. But young Tommy Kilgore, one of Christina's residents, worms his way into Levi's affections. When Tommy and Christina are threatened, will Levi reach out and find healing from the scars...
8) Poor people
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English
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That was the simple yet groundbreaking question William T. Vollmann asked in cities and villages around the globe. The result of Vollmann's fearless inquiry is a view of poverty unlike any previously offered.
Poor People struggles to confront poverty in all its hopelessness and brutality, its pride and abject fear, its fierce misery and quiet resignation, allowing the poor to explain the causes and consequences of their impoverishment in their own...
9) Coal river
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English
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"In this vibrant new historical novel, the acclaimed author of The Plum Tree and What She Left Behind explores one young woman's determination to put an end to child labor in a Pennsylvania mining town... As a child, Emma Malloy left isolated Coal River, Pennsylvania, vowing never to return. Now, orphaned and penniless at nineteen, she accepts a train ticket from her aunt and uncle and travels back to the rough-hewn community. Treated like a servant...
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Cara Romero thought she would work at the factory of little lamps for the rest of her life. But when she loses her job in the Great Recession, she is forced back into the job market for the first time in decades. Set up with a job counselor, Cara instead begins to narrate the story of her life. She recounts her tempestuous love affairs, her relationships with her neighbor Lulu and her sister Angela, her struggles with debt, gentrification, and loss,...
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Three days before Christmas, in the freezing slums of London's East End, thirteen-year-old Gracie Phipps and eight-year-old Minnie Maude Mudway join together in a search for Charlie, the donkey who belonged to Minnie Maude's Uncle Alf. Gracie is shocked to learn that only the day before, someone brutally murdered Uncle Alf and made off with his rag-and-bones cart and the beloved beast who pulled it.
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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 -- could be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on six to seven dollars an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever...
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"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 unplanned pregnancy. She turned to housekeeping to make ends meet, and, with a tenacious grip on her dream to provide her daughter the very best life possible, Stephanie worked days and took classes online to earn a college degree,...
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Appears on list
Description
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...
16) Oliver Twist
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English
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Deals with the adventures of a young orphan boy trying to survive amid greed and poverty in 19th-century London.
17) Ludie's life
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English
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Cynthia Rylant returns to her home state of West Virginia with this powerful and evocative collection of poems. In a heartbreaking narrative that flows like a novel, we follow Ludie from childhood to falling in love and getting married, through the birth of her own children, and on into old age. This is the story of one woman's experiences in a hard-scrabble coal-mining town, a story that brims with universal themes about life, love, and family-and...
18) Back in society
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Series
The poor relation volume 6
Language
English
Description
The poor relations' hard-earned success is in stark contrast to the plight of their latest guest, Lady Jane Fremney. Lonely and bankrupt, Lady Jane has decided to commit suicide. But when Miss Tonks uncovers her plans, the poor relations go into action again to rescue her.
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Balram Halwai is a complicated man. Servant. Philosopher. Entrepreneur. Murderer. Over the course of seven nights, by the scattered light of a preposterous chandelier, Balram tells the terrible and transfixing story of how he came to be a success in life--having nothing but his own wits to help him along.
20) Ethan Frome
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English
Description
a discouraged New England farmer, his hypochondriac wife and a girl who still finds some joy in living are the main characters in this grim tale of retribution.