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"When Amanda Oliver began work as a school librarian, fueled by a lifelong love of books and a desire to help, she felt qualified for the job. What she learned was that librarians are expected to serve as mediators and mental-health-crisis support professionals, customer service reps and administrators of overdose treatment, fierce loyalists to institutionalized mythology and enforced silence, and arms of state surveillance. Based on firsthand experiences...
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"A Recommended Read from: Los Angeles Times * The Week * Lit Hub A stunning and brutally honest memoir that shines a light on what happens when female desire conflicts with a culture of masculinity in crisis In her midthirties and newly free from a terrible relationship, Tabitha Lasley quit her job at a London magazine, packed her bags, and poured her savings into a six-month lease on an apartment in Aberdeen, Scotland. She decided to make good on...
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Class Lives is an anthology of narratives dramatizing the lived experience of class in America. It includes forty original essays from authors who represent a range of classes, genders, races, ethnicities, ages, and occupations across the United States. Born into poverty, working class, the middle class, and the owning class-and every place in between-the contributors describe their class journeys in narrative form, recounting one or two key stories...
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Facing Resource Insecurity includes the first-person stories of seventeen individuals who have experienced the rippling consequences of need, and the resounding hope that exists when communities come together to help their neighbors.
From a former inmate who has found his calling as a counselor, to a young mother who sought services to feed her kids after an illness, topics explored in this compilation include food, housing, education, finances, emotional/mental...
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A woman reflects on her working-class roots, her unsuitable exes, and her accidental road to happiness in a memoir of "many delights" (Atlanta Journal Constitution).
A misfit in Spooner, Wisconsin, with its farms, bars, and strip joints, Debra Monroe leaves to earn a degree, then another, and another, and builds a career-if only because her plans to be a midwestern housewife continually get scuttled. Fearless but naive, she vaults over class barriers...
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A socioeconomic viewpoint from a street survivor, in the San Francisco North Bay, where the greatest amount of disparity between economic classes exists in America. Struggling to survive without shelter, we chronicle the continuing journey through homelessness. The issue is taken to the political level and the experience becomes written works as Fast Eddie still searches for mercy and home.
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"DON'T believe the naysayers. The American Dream-the fable that says if you work hard and follow the rules, you'll make it-is alive and well."
-New York Post
Adam W. Shepard's Scratch Beginnings is the fascinating and eye-opening account of the grand social experiment the author undertook in response to Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed. Subtitled "Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream," Scratch Beginnings chronicles Shepard's successful...
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A lively memoir in an authentic and engaging voice of growing up street savvy, the youngest of four boys, in the famous downtown working-class slums of Everton, Liverpool in the '50s and '60s before they were demolished. Our young hero is talented but his valiant attempts to 'be good' sometimes fail because of violence, poverty, bullying teachers and other disasters. He loves music and fishing; accidently meets Beatles George and John; wins big on...
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Educated but untaught, involved but unknowing, Catholic but spiritually reserved, white but unwittingly blinded by the ubiquitous whiteness surrounding him. These are some of the many storylines W.E. 'Bill' Wynne explores in this relevant account of his social and racial justice advocacy journey and conversion over the course of his life. Despite these looming shadows, other hurdles hovering over his middle-class upbringing, and other missed signals...
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"Middle-aged, openly gay, liberal highbrow J.R. Jamison spends his days in a world of trigger warnings and safe spaces, while his conservative trigger-happy dad, Dave, spends his questioning why Americans have become so sensitive. At the height of the 2016 Election, the two decide to put differences aside and take a road trip to Dave's hometown in rural Missouri for his fifty-five year class reunion. But with the constant backdrop of the Trump vs....
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The victim of a rare cosmetic condition, Lady Colin Campbell was wrongly registered and brought up as a boy in an aristocratic family in Jamaica. She enjoyed privileges, but her teenage years were blighted, leaving her unable to receive essential medical treatment until she was 21. She became a model and a designer, and in the 1970s embarked on a short and violent marriage to Lord Colin Campbell.
In this autobiography she writes of a life-long struggle...
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No shuttle buses here: De-Bug, a new collection of true stories from the social justice organization of the same name, shows a side of working in Silicon Valley that you won't read about in the business section. As tech moguls land the cover of Forbes, the South Bay's working class is making ends meet as metal scrappers, factory workers, club bouncers, hairstylists, rickshaw drivers, ice cream cart pushers. The stories in De-Bug are poignant, often...
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There was no reason to bet on Bruce Johnson, given where he started out. Poor, Black, and raised by a single mother who had a secret. He was the child she hid in plain view from the rest of her family. Bruce would spend his youth at Chickasaw Park in Louisville, Kentucky's segregated west end. He would grab the low hanging tree branches, then swing out over the Ohio River before dropping into the dangerous water below. He didn't know how to swim but...
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"On Fire" is an award-winning memoir that readers are calling a heartbreaking and sometimes darkly humorous mother-daughter, coming-of-age tale written with gritty authenticity by author and award-winning journalist Steph West. In this cohesive collection of provocative stories, West details the precarious journey of raising her daughter while going through a quarter-life crisis of her own. She writes intimately about their mother-daughter relationship...
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Do you look someone in the eyes as you walk down the street, or do you simply pass them without making any verbal or nonverbal contact?
If you choose to avoid contact, you are simply choosing not to share any of your Superpowers: The abilities of uninvited kindness and unconditional love.
These abilities can manifest as a simple hello, a nod of the head while looking someone in the eyes, a smile as you pass them, or even a hug. While it may not...
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Being poor, broke, and "oilfield-trash" during the 40's and 50's, presents a young boy many challenges as he adapts to society's obscure status classes. His parents slide from a Christian lifestyle into alcoholism while pursuing "black gold" through Wyoming and Nebraska giving rise to eleven school changes. Oil "boomtowns," populated with hardworking tough individuals, were always socially, segregated from the locals. Wally's plight for a supportive...
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Darren McGarvey has experienced poverty and its devastations firsthand. He grew up in a community where violence was a form of currency and has lived through addiction, abuse, and homelessness. He knows why people from deprived communities feel angry and unheard. And he wants to explain . . .
So he invites you to come along on a safari of sorts. But not the kind where the wildlife is surveyed from a safe distance. His vivid, visceral, and cogently...
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In the mid-1950s, a young Black teenager named, Mary White, traveled north from Virginia to work for Wendy Sanford's family as a live-in domestic worker for their summer vacation by a remote New England beach. Mary was fifteen, Wendy was twelve. As the Black "help" and the privileged white daughter, they were not, slated for friendship, but Wendy's parents kept bringing Mary back each summer and when Wendy and Mary, now adults, found themselves both...
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