White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy
(Liveright Publishing), Rev. William Barber and Jonathan Wilson-Hargrave
The Rev. William Barber, founder and leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, devotes this book to exploding the myth that hardly any white people are poor and that poverty in America is largely a Black problem. With his co-author Jonathan Wilson-Hargrave, Rev. Barber shows how even though there are 40 million more poor whites than poor Blacks, both Republicans and Democrats and most mainstream media present poverty – along with issues like welfare, unemployment, and food stamps – as solely a Black problem. The book exposes “the lies that prevent us from seeing the pain of poor white families who have been offered little more than their ‘whiteness’ and angry social media posts to sustain them.” It calls for a new “moral fusion movement that seeks to unite people who have been pitted against one another by politicians (and billionaires) who depend on the poorest of us not being here.”
Language Brokers: Children of Immigrants Translating Inequality and Belonging for Their Families
(Stanford U. Press), Hyeyoung Kwon
Based on interviews with working-class Mexican- and Korean-American children of first-generation immigrants, this book shows how these young people “creatively use their in-between status to resolve structural problems to ensure their families’ basic citizen rights are upheld in interactions with teachers, social workers, landlords, doctors, and police officers.” The result, the publisher promises, is “a critical examination of American culture, laying bare the contradictions between the ideals of equality and the exclusion of immigrants, [including] racialized understandings of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ immigrants – which are embedded in everyday interactions and institutional practices.”
In Velvet: New and Selected Poems
(Bottom Dog Press), Jeanne Bryner
Janet Zandy, author of Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work, writes: “Jeanne Bryner works language, opens it unexpectedly, pries meanings and memories, spins gold from mud, and always hears and speaks the sorrows and hopes of working people.” Bryner’s poetry in this collection is a celebration of unsung but essential workers, including teachers, nurses, and firefighters.
What Work Means: Beyond the Puritan Work Ethic
(Cornell U. Press), Claudia Strauss
This book explores what work means by telling the stories of unemployed Americans from day laborers to corporate managers, immigrant and native-born, men and women of different ages. It challenges both views of waged work as central to a good life and those that see work solely as exploitative and soul-crushing. Instead, it presents a wide range of how Americans “think about the place of work in a good life, gendered meanings of breadwinning, accepting financial support from family, friends, and the state, and what the ever-elusive American dream means to them.”
In Levittown’s Shadow: Poverty in America’s Wealthiest Postwar Suburb
(U. of Chicago Press), Tim Keogh
This historically informed analysis of suburban poverty since World War II focuses on Long Island’s Levittown, “often considered the archetypal suburb.” As the publisher explains, it shows how “military contracts subsidized well-paid employment welding airplanes or filing paperwork, while weak labor laws impoverished suburbanites who mowed lawns, built houses, scrubbed kitchen floors, and stocked supermarket shelves. Federal mortgage programs helped some families buy orderly single-family homes and enter the middle class but also underwrote landlord efforts to cram poor families into suburban attics, basements, and sheds.” Keogh details how these and other public policies led to middle-class comfort for some and working-class poverty for others, and he argues that “ignoring suburban poverty doomed efforts to reduce inequality.”
Help Wanted: A Novel
(W.W. Norton), Adelle Waldman
Kirkus Reviews says Waldman’s novel is “the workplace dramedy of the year.” It was also an Editors’ Choice from The New York Times Book Review. Waldman’s second novel, Help Wanted follows a crew of behind-the-scenes big-box store workers. They come in well before dawn, unload and shelve inventory, and then largely disappear. When their store manager is promoted, leaving a top spot open, the group plots to improve their lot by getting the division manager they hate promoted as well–and out of their hair. It’s not about one of them moving up; it’s about improving things for the group. NPR writes that the book is a “group portrait” of its working-class characters.
Radical Connecticut: People’s History In The Constitution State
(Hard Ball Press), Andy Piascik and Steve Thornton
Most state and local histories focus on politicians, generals, business moguls and other elites. Radical Connecticut is about “workers, the poor, people of color, women, artists and others who engaged in the never-ending struggle for justice and freedom.” Working-class studies stalwart, Hard Ball Press, promises that it “offers a fresh look at history that should especially inspire young people engaged in social justice work in an increasingly dangerous world.” Various endorsers call it “fun to read,” “a monumental work of scholarship,” “needed insight and perspective,” and “should be required reading in every school.”
Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company
(Simon & Schuster Audio), Alice Driver
After a deadly chemical accident in 2011 at Tyson Foods’ headquarters chicken processing plant in Springdale, Arkansas, local reporter Alice Driver began interviewing workers there, most of whom are immigrants, and became focused on telling their life stories when Covid hit. Forced to continue to work in unsafe conditions, watching friends get sick and some die, these immigrant workers organized themselves to fight back, eventually filing a lawsuit against the country’s largest meatpacking company. The publisher promises: “Richly detailed, fiercely honest, and deeply reported, Life and Death of the American Worker will forever change the way we think about the people who prepare our food.”
Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility
(U. of Chicago Press), Melissa Osborne
Sociologist Melissa Osborne interviewed 150 first-generation and low-income students at 18 different elite colleges and universities. She found that in addition to financial and academic challenges, these students “are faced with an impossible choice: turn away from their former lives to blend in or stay true to themselves and remain on the outside.” She shows how this often leads to alienation, mental health challenges, and poor academic outcomes, and Osborne criticizes some first-generation support programs and argues for support that includes helping students manage the “difficult choices between upward mobility or maintaining authenticity and community.”
Newborn: Running Away, Breaking with the Past, Building a New Family
(Penguin), Kerry Hudson
Hudson’s memoir Lowborn focused on the hardships of growing up in poverty. Newborn wrestles with new motherhood, and to some degree, the expectations and pressures placed on mothers who come from childhoods of struggle themselves. In an interview with The Guardian, Hudson says:
“I grew up with the narrative that working-class mothers were the worst of the worst, and then I was told directly by people quite often that with my background, having a child was going to be difficult. WhenLowborncame out there was a really long review on Amazon from a woman who said – in capital letters – do not have children, please, and if you do, refer yourself to extreme psychiatric maternal care.At the time, I thought I was infertile but we were still trying for a baby, and I was just heartbroken.”
Newborn asks “what next, after a childhood like hers? What hope is there of creating a different life for herself, let alone future generations?” According to the Herald, Hudson’s memoir is a “rallying cryto those still stuck in the quagmire not to let society’s low expectations become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy
(U. of Chicago Press), Teresa Ghilarducci
The publisher calls this book “a damning portrait of the dire realities of retirement in the United States – and how we can fix it.” Elders in the US face the highest risk of poverty in advanced countries, and Ghilarducci tells the stories of senior workers “locked into jobs not because they love to work but because they must.” She also shows how with “relatively low-cost changes” we could finance and manage retirements that would allow people to truly choose when to stop working and enjoy their golden years.
Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification
(U. of Chicago Press), Mike Amezcua
Chicago is home to the third largest Mexican-American population in the US, and much of that population resides in distinctive working-class neighborhoods like Pilsen and Little Village. Mike Amezcua traces how immigrants and the children of immigrants developed diverse strategies to fight and adapt to white resistance and the forces of segregation, economic predation, and gentrification. He discovers “how unlikely combinations of social conservatism and real estate savvy paved new paths for Latinx assimilation.” According to the publisher, it is a multiracial history of postwar Chicago that “sheds new light on the origins and endurance of urban inequality.”
Deindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence, and Class
(McGill-Queen’s U. Press), Steven HIgh
In this book Steven High tells the stories of two linked but separate Montreal working-class neighborhoods where industry was concentrated in the 20th century – Point Saint-Charles, a historically white working-class neighborhood, and Little Burgundy, home to the city’s English-speaking Black community. In doing so, he explores how class and race interact with each other to the differential detriment of both. With deindustrialization, “Point Saint-Charles was left to rot until it was revalorized by gentrification, whereas Little Burgundy was torn apart by urban renewal and highway construction.” For High, “deindustrialization is a process of physical and social ruination” and “part of a wider political project that leaves working-class communities impoverished and demoralized.” In a city thought to have made a successful post-industrial transition, High shows who has prospered and who has not – and why.
Freak Show
(Fernwood Press), Casey Killingsworth
Kathleen Flenniken, Washington State Poet Laureate 2012-2014, writes that “reading Casey Killingsworth’s collection Freak Show is like lucking into a conversation with the plain-spoken poet on the next barstool. He’ll tell you about his life – the losses, the graveyard shifts, the moments of consolation and glory – with so much soul and style, you’ll lose track of everything else and go home feeling better about the human race.” In this work, Killingsworth examines his menagerie of odd jobs, his own awkwardness, and the adventure of interacting with the cast of characters around him
Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women
(Encounter Books), Batya Ungar-Sargon
This book by the deputy opinion editor at Newsweek is written for an educated middle-class reader who knows little of working-class life, but is open to learning how the other half lives. Batya Ungar-Sargon travelled across the country interviewing “working-class Americans of all races, political orientations, and occupations,” and she presents a portrait of the “increasingly precarious lives [of] cleaning ladies, health care aides, cops, truck drivers, fast food workers, electricians” and others. Combining this reporting with a biting critique of US economic policy, she explores “America’s emergent class divide, in which the most basic elements of a secure and stable life are increasingly out of reach for those without a college education.”
Health and Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body
(U. of Massachusetts Press), Steffan Blayney
This book traces the development of a “science of work” in Britain from 1870 to 1939 that sought to increase economic productivity by “transforming the body of the worker into a machine.” In focusing on the health of workers, however, this “science” came to see fatigue as “the ultimate pathology of the working-class body, reducing workers’ capacity to perform continued physical or mental labor.” Against the efforts of biomedical and psychological experts, politicians, and capitalists, Steffan Blayney shows how workers resisted “the logics of productivity and efficiency being imposed on them, articulating alternative perspectives on work, health, and the body.”
Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class
(Simon & Schuster), Sarah Smarsh
Following her National Book Award finalist memoir Heartland and She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs, Smarsh’s newest release is a collection of her essays written between 2013 and 2024 on a wide range of topics—from the criminalization of poverty to working as a Hooters girl. The Los Angeles Times writes: “Smarsh’s ability to interweave stories—including aspects of her life—places her in the tradition of working-class journalism exemplified by Studs Terkel, Barbara Ehrenreich and others…The deep empathy that animates Smarsh’s prose combines with a rigorous intellect committed to uncovering and explaining structural causes of our current cultural moment.”
Books through Bars: Stories from the Prison Books Movement
(U. of Georgia Press), Dave Marquis and Moira Marquis, editors.
For the past 70 years the prison books movement has gathered in thirty states to read letters from prisoners and send books to them in return. The essays in Books through Bars “explain the need for prison book programs and offer advice on how to establish or become involved with prison books programs, as well as shedding light on current challenges.”
The Americanization of Lay Catholics on Organized Labor: The American Catholic Labor Schools
(Edwin Mellen Press), Paul Lubienecki
This book explores the contradictions between Roman Catholic teachings and the “principles of individualism, democratization and egalitarianism embedded into the American consciousness.” It shows how Catholic labor schools were vehicles for the laity to reconcile “the Church’s orientation of social goals above individual practice” with American individualism, thereby reshaping the character of the American Catholic Church.
Ron Carey and the Teamsters: How a UPS Driver Became the Greatest Union Reformer of the 20th Century by Putting Members First
(Monthly Review Press), Ken Reiman
Retired Teamster UPS driver Ken Reiman recounts the rise and fall of Teamster reformer Ron Carey from a local union officer in the mid-1960s to president of the international union in 1991. Dan La Botz endorses the book as “a sympathetic and frank portrait of the former Teamster president who in 1997 led one of the country’s largest strikes and was then driven from union office by the powers he had challenged. Reiman has talked to everyone, read everything, and provides a comprehensive account of Carey’s life as he dealt with the challenges of the Mafia, the Teamster Old Guard, UPS, and the government. We come away having met an honest man who was ensnared in the net woven by big business, government, and the Teamster Old Guard. If he was defeated, still we admire him for having worked to create a union that fought for its members.”
Depression of the Zellenium
(Poetry Box), Elle Verde
Verde’s newest collection of poems examines 2019-2022 one year at a time, including the chaos of being an essential worker during the COVID crisis. Todd Robinson, author of Mass for Shut-Ins, says that Verde “writes poems close to poetry’s bone: in and of the body, the family, the observable world that both holds us and harms us.”
Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue
(U. of California Press), Elena Shih
One highly hyped effort to combat human sex trafficking are sex worker rescue programs that promise freedom from enslavement and redemptive wages for former sex workers. This ethnographic study explores two American organizations that offer vocational training in jewelry production for former sex workers in China and Thailand to illustrate Elena Shih’s argument that “anti-trafficking rescue and rehabilitation projects profit off persistent labor abuse of women workers and imagined but savvily marketed narratives of redemption.”
Backbone of the Nation: Mining Communities and the Great Strike of 1984-85
(Yale U. Press), Robert Gildea
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the iconic miners’ strike in Great Britain – a titanic battle between the National Union of Mineworkers and Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. Oxford historian Robert Gildea has used interviews and oral histories from mining communities across the country – “from South Wales to the Midlands, Yorkshire, County Durham, and Fife” – to give a comprehensive account of the strike in all its dimensions. One reviewer praises the book thus: “By inviting us to listen carefully to the men and women on the strike’s frontline, he’s created history that is revelatory, gripping, and—best of all—infused with humanity.”