poverty

In 1941 Chicago, fifteen-year-old Ruby, a Polish-American girl from the slums, leaves her meat-packing plant job to be a "taxi" dancer, paid a dime apiece to dance with men in a dance hall, and becomes entangled with the mob.

This book presents debates on the extent and causes of poverty in America and discusses possible measures to help the poor.

Angry and humiliated when his sharecropper father is jailed for stealing food for his family, a young African-American boy grows in courage and understanding with the help of the devoted dog Sounder.

A young woman, looking back on her childhood, recounts her farm family's poverty, her father's cowardice, and her younger brother's obsession for digging tunnels and living underground.

Heaven, her brother Tom, and the younger children of the Casteel family cling to their pride despite being the poorest family in the hills. When their stepmother leaves, their father's scheme threatens to destroy Heaven and the other children forever.

Jeremy, who longs to have the black high tops that everyone at school seems to have but his grandmother cannot afford, is excited when he sees them for sale in a thrift shop and decides to buy them even though they are the wrong size.

Going undercover, writer Barbara Ehrenreich describes how life is for low-income workers in jobs which really require skill and are mentally and physically exhausting.

In the 1950s, an African-American family on Chicago's south side is torn by different dreams for the future when they receive an insurance settlement: son Walter Lee wants to open a liquor store; daughter Beneatha wants to go to medical school; and the matriarch, Lena, wants to buy a home in a white suburb.

Explores the relationship between academic achievement and low socioeconomic status, arguing that chronic exposure to poverty causes negative physical changes to the brain, and identifying key factors that can help students achieve emotionally, socially, and academically.

Takes a cognitive approach to class and generational poverty; examines and names the experiences of living in poverty, middle class, and wealth; identifies myths about poverty and wealth; details findings about interventions, resources, and causes of poverty, and emphasizes the thinking, communication, and learning patterns involved in breaking out of poverty, with case studies, resources, and more.