Central Kansas Library System

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...

Recounts the experiences of the author, a college graduate, as he spends one year living as a homeless person and learns valuable lessons about what it takes to break out of the cycle of poverty in the United States.

"Class paints an intimate and heartbreaking portrait of motherhood as it converges and often conflicts with personal desire and professional ambition. Who has the right to create art? Who has the right to go to college? And what kind of work is valued inour culture? In clear, candid, and moving prose, Class grapples with these questions, offering a searing indictment of America's educational system and an inspiring testimony of a mother's triumph...

Presents the life and legacy of Elvis, from his birth in Mississippi through his music career, his time in the army, his marriage, and his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

"By official count, more than one out of every six American children live beneath the poverty line. But statistics alone tell little of the story. In Invisible Americans, Jeff Madrick brings to light the often invisible reality and irreparable damage of child poverty in America. Keeping his focus on the children, he examines the roots of the problem, including the toothless remnants of our social welfare system, entrenched racism, and a government...

"I've been waiting for this book for a long time. Well, not this book, because I never imagined that the book I was waiting for would be so devastatingly smart and funny, so consistently entertaining and unflinchingly on target. In fact, I would like to have written it myself - if, that is, I had lived Linda Tirado's life and extracted all the hard lessons she has learned. I am the author of Nickel and Dimed, which tells the story of my own brief...