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...

Deals with the adventures of a young orphan boy trying to survive amid greed and poverty in 19th-century London.

From the beet fields of North Dakota to the National Forest campgrounds of California to Amazon's CamperForce program in Texas, employers have discovered a new, low-cost labor pool, made up largely of transient older Americans. Finding that social security comes up short, often underwater on mortgages, these invisible casualties of the Great Recession have taken to the road by the tens of thousands in late-model RVs, travel trailers, and vans, forming...

Eden, Kentucky, is just another dying, bad-luck town, known only for the legend of E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth-century author and illustrator who wrote "The Underland" -- and disappeared. Before she vanished, Starling House appeared. But everyone agrees that it's best to let the uncanny house and its last lonely heir, Arthur Starling go to rot ... Opal is a lot of things--orphan, high school dropout, full-time cynic and part-time cashier--but...

During Sarah Smarsh's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the forces of cyclical poverty and the country's changing economic policies solidified her family's place among the working poor. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country and examine the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less. Her personal history...

"Has Jack the Ripper returned? Summer 1901, and the great Pan-American Exposition welcomes the world to Buffalo, New York-Queen of the Lakes . . . the Electric City. Eight million visitors throng the bustling boomtown-all of them looking for a good time. While the Pan-American blazes bright, in its shadow lies a zone of darker the Tenderloin District, a rabbit's warren of saloons, brothels, and ask-no-questions hotels. In this sprawling vice quarter,...