Vance, a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, provides an account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm. J.D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like...

Analyzes the economic crisis while making recommendations for responsibly navigating its aftermath, suggesting that the downturn actually resulted from a disproportionate concentration of wealth at the expense of a debt-burdened middle class.

"Ashford, Vermont, might look like your typical sleepy New England college town, but to the shadowy residents who live among the remains of its abandoned mills and factories, it's known as "Burntown." Eva Sandeski, known as "Necco" on the street, has been a part of this underworld for years, ever since the night her father Miles drowned in a flood that left her and her mother Lily homeless. A respected professor, Miles was also an inventor of fantastic...

"A progressive takedown of the uber-capitalist status quo that has enriched millionaires and billionaires at the expense of the working class, and a blueprint for what transformational change would actually look like. It's OK to be angry about capitalism. Reflecting on our turbulent times, Senator Bernie Sanders takes on the billionaire class and speaks blunt truths about our country's failure to address the destructive nature of a system that is...

In which the author describes her own life, in the context of the previous 5 generations of farmers and teenage mothers, to illustrate the hardships and near insurmountable obstacles for the working poor to elevate themselves from poverty.

Reveals how the voyages of Columbus reintroduced plants and animals that had been separated millions of years earlier, documenting how the ensuing exchange of flora and fauna between Eurasia and the Americas fostered a European rise, devastated imperial China, convulsed Africa, and made Mexico City the center of the world. [From publisher's description]

Fiona Hill grew up in a world of terminal decay: the last of northern England's coal mines had closed, businesses were shuttering, and despair was etched in the faces around her. Her father urged her to get out, saying "There is nothing for you here, pet." She went further than he ever dreamed: She studied in Moscow and at Harvard, became an American citizen, and served 3 U. S. Presidents. But in both Russia and the U. S., she saw troubling reflections...

A critique of the white American class structure argues that the paths of social mobility that once advanced the nation are now serving to further isolate an elite upper class while enforcing a growing and resentful white underclass.

"Senator Elizabeth Warren has long been an outspoken champion of America's middle class, and by the time the people of Massachusetts elected her in 2012, she had become one of the country's leading progressive voices. Now, at a perilous moment for our nation, she has written a book that is at once an illuminating account of how we built the strongest middle class in history, a scathing indictment of those who have spent the past thirty-five years...