This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. It is the story of Bragg's father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the habit of running out on the people who needed him most....

Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature and scientific theories over four hundred years, Isenberg upends assumptions about America's supposedly class-free society--where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction...

No one writes about the South like Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg (All Over But the Shoutin). Once again, he lends his voice to the working people of the deep South, and tells the story of a memorable figure in a singular time-a man on a lost stretch of dirt road along the Alabama-Georgia border. The Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist and author of All Over But the Shoutin' continues his personal history of the Deep South with an evocation of his...

"A young writer's sincere search (with his dog) for an authentic life--buying a ruined house in Detroit for $500, fixing it up nail by nail, and, in the process, participating in the grassroots rebirth of the city itself."--Provided by publisher.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "A riveting book."—The Wall Street Journal"Essential reading."—David Brooks, New York TimesFrom a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working classHillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline...

This Book Club in a Box is a book discussion kit which circulates for six weeks and contains everything you need to host your own book club. A passionate and personal analysis of the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country. The decline of white working-class Americans, a demographic that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm - but never before written about as...