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Banned Books Week - AMPL
Freedom to Read: Books Unite Us
Right to Read: Banned Books
Tuesdays With Friends
Freedom to Read: Books Unite Us
Right to Read: Banned Books
Tuesdays With Friends
Description
Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, the author decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job, any job, can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, she left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from...
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Book Club Bundles - Geneva Public Library
Book Club Favorites - GPLD
GPLD Book Club Bundles
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Book Club Favorites - GPLD
GPLD Book Club Bundles
More Lists...
Description
At 28, Stephanie Land's dreams -- breaking free from the roots of her hometown in the Pacific Northwest, attending a university, and becoming a writer -- were cut short when a summer fling turned into an unexpected pregnancy. She turned to housekeeping to make ends meet, working days and taking college classes online. She also began to write relentlessly. She wrote the true stories that weren't being told: the stories of overworked and underpaid Americans....
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"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...
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"A history of the class system in America from the colonial era to the present illuminates the crucial legacy of the underprivileged white demographic, citing the pivotal contributions of lower-class white workers in wartime, social policy, and the rise of the Republican Party"--NoveList.
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When Stephanie Land set out to write her memoir Maid, she never could have imagined what was to come. Handpicked by President Barack Obama as one of the best books of 2019, it was called "an eye-opening journey into the lives of the working poor" (People). Later it was adapted into the hit Netflix series Maid, which was viewed by 67 million households and was Netflix's fourth most-watched show in 2021, garnering three Primetime Emmy Award nominations....
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With stark poignancy and political dispassion, Tightrope draws us deep into an "other America." The authors tell this story, in part, through the lives of some of the children with whom Kristof grew up, in rural Yamhill, Oregon, an area that prospered for much of the twentieth century but has been devastated in the last few decades as blue-collar jobs disappeared. About one-quarter of the children on Kristof's old school bus died in adulthood from...
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"Many Americans take comfort and convenience for granted. We eat at nice restaurants, order groceries online, and hire nannies to care for kids. Getting Me Cheap is a riveting portrait of the lives of the low-wage workers-primarily women-who make this lifestyle possible. Sociologists Lisa Dodson and Amanda Freeman follow women in the food, health care, home care, and other low-wage industries as they struggle to balance mothering with bad jobs and...
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"David Shipler ... journeys deeply into the lives of individual store clerks and factory workers, farm laborers and sweatshop seamstresses, illegal immigrants in menial jobs and Americans saddled with immense student loans and paltry wages. They are known as the working poor ... Braced by hard fact and personal testimony, he unravels the forces that confine people in the quagmire of low wages. And unlike most works on poverty, this book also offers...
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English
Description
Following its initial publication, the critically acclaimed Betrayal of Work became one of the most influential policy books about economic life in America; it was discussed in the pages of Newsweek, Business Week, Fortune, the Washington Post, Newsday, and USA Today, as well as in public policy journals and in broadcast interviews, including a one-on-one with Bill Moyers on PBS's NOW. Beth Shulman's powerfully argued book offers a full program to...
13) Nickel and dimed
Author
Language
English
Description
To discover how others exist on minimum wage, the author leaves her home, takes the cheapest lodgings she can find, and accepts whatever jobs she's offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she works variously as a waitress, nursing home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She learned many things, including the fact that one job is not enough: you need at least two if you intend to live indoors.
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"A collection of compelling, hard-hitting first-person essays, poems, and photos that expose what our punitive social systems do to so many Americans. Going for Broke, edited by Alissa Quart, Executive Director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and David Wallis, former Managing Director of EHRP, gives voice to a range of gifted writers for whom "economic precarity" is more than just another assignment. All illustrate what the late Barbara...
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Description
"In this age of shortened office visits, doctors take care of their patients' immediate needs and often elide their own personal histories. But as reflected in Broke, Michael Stein takes the time to listen to the experiences of his patients whose financial challenges complicate every decision in life they make. Stein asks his patients to tell him about their financial conditions not only to find out how to better treat them but also to bear witness...
17) Waging a living
Language
English
Description
"Over three years, the film follows four hard-working individuals as they strive for their piece of the American Dream but find only low wages, dead end jobs, and a tattered safety net in their way"--Container.
Author
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English
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"How May I Help You? is Deepak Singh's insightful and thought-provoking account of disillusionment when, as an educated upper-class Indian, he moves with his American wife to the United States and discovers that America doesn't care if he has an MBA from India or had worked for the BBC. Like many immigrants before him, Singh discovers that in America employers only trust him with a minimum wage job as a clerk, but his disappointment and embarrassment...
Author
Language
Polish
Description
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.
"Czasami jedna zła decyzja ma wpływ na całe życie. Tak było, kiedy Stephanie związała się z niewłaściwym mężczyzną. To miała być tylko wakacyjna przygoda - a jednak kilkanaście miesięcy później Stephanie mieszkała z agresywnym...