Summary: "In Tales of Two Americas, some of the literary world's most exciting writers look beyond numbers and wages to convey what it feels like to live in this divided nation. Their extraordinarily powerful stories, essays, and poems demonstrate how boundaries break down when experiences are shared, and that in sharing our stories we can help to alleviate a suffering that touches so many...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Penguin Books 2017
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 818 TALGriffith, Elisabeth
Summary: "The Nineteenth Amendment was an incomplete victory. A century later, women are still grappling with how to use the vote and their political power to expand civil rights, confront racial violence, improve maternal health, advance educational and employment opportunities, and secure reproductive rights. Formidable chronicles the efforts of white and Black women to advance sometimes competing...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Pegasus Books 2022
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 305.42 GRICopies Available at Peninsula
1 available in Adult, Call number: 305.42 GRIChung, Nicole
Summary: "From the bestselling author of ALL YOU CAN EVER KNOW comes a searing memoir of class, inequality, and grief-a daughter's search to understand the lives her adoptive parents led, the life she forged as an adult, and the lives she's lost. In this country, unless you attain extraordinary wealth, you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways you'd hoped. You will learn to live...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 2023
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 921 CHUNG, NICOLE CHUCashin, Sheryll
Summary: "A meditation on how America protects and overinvests in "white space" and disinvests, surveils, and stereotypes in "the Hood;" Cashin calls for abolition of these anti-Black processes and bold new investment to repair poor Black neighborhoods and our broken race relations"--
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Publisher / Publication Date: Beacon Press 2021
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 307.1 CASEichner, Maxine
Summary: US families have been pushed to the wall. At the bottom of the economic ladder, poor and working-class adults aren't forming stable relationships and can't give their kids the start they need because of low wages and uncertain job prospects. Toward the top, professional parents' lives have become a grinding slog of long hours of paid work. Meanwhile their kids are overstressed by pressure to...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Oxford University Press 2020
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 306.85 EICNeiman, Garrett
Summary: "It's no secret that our country has a serious problem when it comes to wealth inequality - and systemic racism and patriarchy have only exacerbated the advantages of wealthy white men. Over the past three decades, America's richest white men have only become richer, while those suffering in poverty have only gotten poorer. The divide may seem too great to bridge, but Rich White Men exposes the...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Legacy Lit, Hachette Books 2023
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1 available in New Non-fiction, Call number: 305.5 NEISmiley, Tavis
Summary: Presents an analysis of the recent increase of poverty in the United States, even among the middle class, describing twelve steps that can be undertaken to give the poor more equitable access to housing, education, and health care.
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Publisher / Publication Date: SmileyBooks 2012
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 339.22 SMIKonczal, Mike
Summary: "The progressive economics writer redefines the national conversation about American freedom"--
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Publisher / Publication Date: The New Press 2021
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 330.973 KONPacker, George
Summary: A National Book Award-winning author examines America's current descent into a failed state and discusses the ways we can leverage this moment to forge a new path forward that overcomes injustice, legislative paralysis, and political divides.
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Publisher / Publication Date: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2021
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 973.93 PACBrill, Steven
Summary: "From the award-winning journalist and best-selling author of America's Bitter Pill: a tour de force examination of 1) how and why major American institutions no longer serve us as they should, causing a deep rift between the vulnerable majority and the protected few, and 2) how some individuals and organizations are laying the foundation for real, lasting change. In this revelatory narrative...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Alfred A. Knopf 2018
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 306 BRIMarkovits, Daniel
Summary: As the author reveals the inner workings of the meritocratic machine, he also illuminates the first steps outward, towards a new world that might once again afford dignity and prosperity to the American people.
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Publisher / Publication Date: Penguin Press 2019
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 305.5 MARKlinenberg, Eric
Summary: "An eminent sociologist and bestselling author offers an inspiring blueprint for rebuilding our fractured society. We are living in a time of deep divisions. Americans are sorting themselves along racial, religious, and cultural lines, leading to a level of polarization that the country hasn't seen since the Civil War. Pundits and politicians are calling for us to come together, to find common...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Crown 2018
Copies Available at East Bay
1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 307.76 KLIIfill, Sherrilyn A.
Summary: This blisteringly candid discussion of the American dilemma in the age of Trump brings together the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the former attorney general of the United States, a bestselling author and death penalty lawyer, and a star professor for an honest conversation the country desperately needs to hear. Drawing on their collective decades of work on civil rights issues as well...
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Publisher / Publication Date: The New Press 2018
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 305.8 IFIWade, Sabia
Summary: "Sabia C. Wade, renowned radical doula and educator, speaks to the intersections of systemic issues--such as access to health care, house transportation, and nutrition--and personal trauma work that, if healed, have the power to lead us to collective liberation in all facets of life. Collective liberation rests on the idea that in order for us all to have equity in this world--from the safety...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Chicago Review Press 2023
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 363.96 WADMechanic, Michael
Summary: "A senior editor at Mother Jones dives into the lives of the extremely rich, showing the fascinating, otherworldly realm they inhabit-and the insidious ways this realm harms us all"--
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Publisher / Publication Date: 2021
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 305.5 MECSunkara, Bhaskar
Summary: With the stunning popularity of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Americans are embracing the class politics of socialism. But what, exactly, is socialism? And what would a socialist system in America look like? In The Socialist Manifesto, Bhaskar Sunkara explores socialism's history since the mid-1800s and presents a realistic vision for its future. The editor of Jacobin magazine,...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Basic Books 2019
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 320.53 SUNChang, Jeff
Summary: "In his most recent book, Who We Be, Jeff Chang looked at how art and culture effected massive social changes in American society. Since the book was published, the country has been gripped by waves of racial discord, most notably the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. In these highly relevant, powerful essays, Chang examines some of the most contentious issues in the current discussion of race...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Picador 2016
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 305.8 CHASmith, Mychal Denzel
Summary: "We are better than this" has been the rallying cry since Donald Trump was elected. But as New York Times-bestselling author Mychal Denzel Smith shows, Americans are too comfortable imagining our greatness. We like to believe in the rightness of our path and the inevitability of choosing our better angels. But historically, we've only come close to living up to the ideals we profess after we've...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Bold Type Books 2020
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 973.933 SMIRichardson, Heather Cox
Summary: "While in the short term--militarily--the North won the Civil War, in the long term--ideologically--victory went to the South. The continual expansion of the Western frontier allowed a Southern oligarchic ideology to find a new home and take root. Even with the abolition of slavery and the equalizing power of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the ostensible equalizing of economic...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Oxford University Press 2020
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 306.2 RICGhilarducci, Teresa
Summary: "The issue of the future of Social Security, on which millions of Americans depend, produced great political theater at the State of the Union address. That highlighted a bigger problem of financing retirement as baby boomers seek to retire, often with limited resources. Many argue that the solution to the problem is for people to work longer. Teresa Ghilarducci, a noted expert on retirement,...
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Publisher / Publication Date: The University of Chicago Press 2024
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Place a hold to request this item.Putnam, Robert D.
Summary: "What has happened to the Land of Opportunity? The promise of the American Dream is that anyone, regardless of his or her origins, can have a fair start in life. If we work hard, we can get a good education and achieve success. But over the last several decades a disturbing 'opportunity gap' has unexpectedly emerged between kids from 'have' and 'have-not' backgrounds. The central tenet of the...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Simon & Schuster 2015
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Place a hold to request this item.Stewart, Matthew
Summary: "A trenchant analysis of how the wealthiest 9.9 percent of Americans -- those just below the tip of the wealth pyramid -- have exacerbated the growing inequality in our country and distorted our social values"--
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Publisher / Publication Date: Simon & Schuster 2021
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 305.5 STEFielding-Singh, Priya
Summary: "Inequality in America manifests in many ways, but perhaps nowhere more than in how we eat. From her years of field research, sociologist and ethnographer Priya Fielding-Singh brings us into the kitchens of dozens of families from varied educational, economic, and ethnoracial backgrounds to explore how--and why--we eat the way we do"--
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Publisher / Publication Date: Little, Brown Spark 2021
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 363.8 FIEKhanna, Ro
Summary: "Rep Ro Khanna offers a revolutionary roadmap to facing America's digital divide. In Khanna's vision, "just as people can move to technology, technology can move to people. People need not be compelled to move from one place to another to reap the benefits offered by technological progress" (from the foreword by Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate in Economics)"--
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Publisher / Publication Date: Simon & Schuster 2022