Full AspenCat Catalog

"A debut memoir of grit and tenacity, as one young woman returns to the conservative hometown she always longed to escape to earn a living in the steel mill that casts a shadow over Cleveland. Steel is the only thing that shines in the belly of the mill... To ArcelorMittal Steel Eliese is known as #6691: Utility Worker, but this was never her dream. Fresh out of college, eager to leave behind her conservative hometown and come to terms with her Christian...

A haunting memoir about growing up dirt-poor in the Alabama hills--and about moving on but never really being able to leave. The extraordinary gifts for evocation and insight and the stunning talent for story- telling that earned Rick Bragg a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1996 are here brought to bear on the wrenching story of his own family's life. It is the story of a war-haunted, hard-drinking father and a strong-willed, loving mother who...

Chronicles the lives of the Wendalls, a family on the steep edge of poverty in the windy, riotous Detroit slums.

Publisher's description: This book examines how it was possible and what it meant for ordinary factory workers to become effective unionists and national political participants by the mid-1930s. Lizabeth Cohen follows Chicago workers as they make choices about whether to attend ethnic benefit society meetings or go to the movies, whether to shop in local neighborhood stores or patronize the new A&P. Although workers may not have been political in...

The unattainable quest for middle-class stability is hauntingly captured in this biting portrayal of forgotten America Weaving the brackish humor of Chuck Palahniuk with the empathy of Barbara Ehrenreich, JR Helton brings to life an obscured underside of the American psyche in this unflinching account of life inside the working class of Texas in the 1980s. We first meet Helton as a struggling writer succumbing to the bleak reality of what it means...

Early April 1933. To the costermongers of Covent Garden - sellers of fruit and vegetables on the streets of London - Eddie Pettit was a gentle soul with a near-magical gift for working with horses. When Eddie is killed in a violent accident, the grieving costers are deeply skeptical about the cause of his death. Who would want to kill Eddie and why?

Chronicles the true story of a longshoreman from South Philadelphia who found $1 million lost from a casino and promptly shared it with everyone he knew.

From the carpenter's union in colonial Philadelphia to the strike in 2007 by Chinese restaurant delivery men in New York City, the history of how brave working people struggled to gain fair wages, reasonable hours, and secure lives by forming labor unions.

'We're Still Here' provides powerful, on the ground evidence of the remaking of working-class identity and politics. Drawing on years of fieldwork and over 100 interviews with black, white, and Latino working-class residents of a declining coal town in Pennsylvania, Jennifer M. Silva tells a deep, multi-generational story of pain and politics that will endure long after Trump and the elections of 2016.