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1) Martin Eden
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Recounts the story of Martin Eden, a young seaman struggling to obtain social and intellectual recognition as a writer.
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"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...
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The Valley of the Moon (1913) is a novel by American writer Jack London. Inspired by his experiences as a working-class man and dedicated socialist, London incorporates aspects of his own biography-his interest in sailing, his life on a ranch in Sonoma County-to tell a story of hardship, hope, and perseverance. Having grown disillusioned with the labor movement, London uses the novel to advocate for sustainable agriculture and other alternatives to...
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In this book, Nancy Isenberg reveals that the wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlements to today's hillbillies. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise...
5) The jungle
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Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8 - AR Pts: 22
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A documentary novel portraying industry's conditions at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Sinclair's novel prompted public outrage which led President Theodore Roosevelt to demand an official investigation. This eventually led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug laws.
6) Empire Falls
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.4 - AR Pts: 34
Appears on these lists
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There is a protagonist: forty-something Miles Roby, proprietor of the local greasy spoon and the recently divorced father of a teenage daughter. We meet his ex-wife Janine, his father Max, and a host of Empire Grill regulars. To further complicate things, Miles's brother, David, is suspected of dealing marijuana.
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"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...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.4 - AR Pts: 20
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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...
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"After sixteen novels, Jacqueline Winspear has taken the bold step of turning to memoir, revealing the hardships and joys of her family history. Both shockingly frank and deftly restrained, her memoir tackles such difficult, poignant, and fascinating family memories as her paternal grandfather's shellshock, her mother's evacuation from London during the Blitz; her soft-spoken animal-loving father's torturous assignment to an explosives team during...
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"Douglas Stuart's first novel Shuggie Bain is one of the most successful literary debuts of the century so far. It was awarded the 2020 Booker Prize, and is now published or forthcoming in forty territories, having already sold more than a million copies worldwide. Now Stuart returns with Young Mungo, his extraordinary second novel. Five years in the writing, it is both a page-turner and literary tour de force, a vivid portrayal of working-class...
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Maisie Dobbs novels volume 9
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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?
13) Sons and lovers
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"D.H. Lawrence's most widely read novel and one of the great works of twentieth-century literature, Sons and Lovers is now printed in full for the first time. In 1913, at the time of its first publication, Lawrence reluctantly agreed to the removal of no fewer than eighty passages which until now have never been restored. Here at last is the novel in the form that Lawrence himself wanted - a tenth longer than the incomplete and expurgated version...
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"Orphans Gig and Rye Dolan don't have a penny to their names. The brothers work grueling, odd jobs each day just to secure a meal, and spend nights sleeping wherever they can with other day laborers. Twenty-three-year-old Gig is a passionate union man, fighting for fair pay and calling out the corrupt employers who exploit the working class. Eager to emulate his older brother, Rye follows suit, though he can't quite muster Gig's passion for the cause....
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"The untold story of the women killed by Jack the Ripper--and a gripping portrait of Victorian London--[this book] changes the narrative of these murders forever. Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Catherine, and Mary jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from some of London's wealthiest and poorest neighborhoods, from teh favtory towns of middle England, and from Wales and Sweden. They wrote ballads, rand coffeehouses, lived...
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Appears on list
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Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history arguing that the “Global South” was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress, as exalted by widely taught formulations such as “manifest destiny” and “Jacksonian democracy,” and shows how placing African American, Latinx,...
19) Class: a memoir
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Pub. Date
2023.
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"Class paints an intimate and heartbreaking portrait of motherhood as it converges and often conflicts with personal desire and professional ambition. Who has the right to create art? Who has the right to go to college? And what kind of work is valued in our culture? In clear, candid, and moving prose, Class grapples with these questions, offering a searing indictment of America's educational system and an inspiring testimony of a mother's triumph...
20) Country hardball
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After more than a decade spent in and out of juvenile detention, halfway houses, and jail, Roy Alison returns to his rural hometown determined to do better, to be better. But what he finds is a working-class community devastated by the economic downturn--a town without anything to hold onto but the past.