Full AspenCat Catalog

"The Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a new and bracing argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it. The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and...

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.

"Through much of human history, only a small, elite group escaped the hardships of poverty. Industrialization helped reverse that trend, and world poverty has been steadily decreasing for 200 years. However, is the total eradication of poverty possible? This book traces the history and understanding of poverty, explores the realities of those living in poverty around the world, and examines innovations designed to eliminate extreme poverty on a global...

"[The author] takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the 20 dollars a month she has left after paying for their rundown apartment. Scott is a gentle nurse consumed by a heroin addiction. Lamar, a man with no legs and a neighborhood full of boys to look after, tries to work his way out of debt. Vanetta participates in a botched stickup...

Presents facts about poverty, covering its causes, policies to alleviate the problem, and its effects.

No one wants to live in poverty. Few people would want others to do so. Yet, we find ourselves in a situation where millions of people worldwide live in poverty. According to the World Bank in 2010, 1.2 billion people lived below the extreme poverty line with an income of U.S. $1.25 or less a day and 2.4 billion lived on less than U.S. $2 a day. Why is that? What has been done about it in the past? And what is being done about it now? In this Very...

Indigo is a boy with a dream. He spends his mornings in a refrigerator box, his afternoons shoveling snow, and his nights in the basement of a homeless shelter. But during every free moment, he draws and dreams of becoming a famous artist. His best friend Jade looks after him, but she is arrested for shoplifting and he's left all alone. With his box of pencils under his arm, he sets out on a quest to search for Jade and discovers a whole new world...

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption....