Books by

$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America - Eden & Shaefer (2016)

kariblack — 2024-10-19 15:19:48 UTC

The story of a kind of poverty in America so deep that we, as a country, don't even think exists—from a leading national poverty expert who “defies convention.” (The New York Times)
Jessica Compton’s family of four would have no income if she didn’t donate plasma twice a week at her local donation center in Tennessee. Modonna Harris and her teenage daughter, Brianna, in Chicago, often have no food but spoiled milk on weekends.
After two decades of brilliant research on American poverty, Kathryn Edin noticed something she hadn’t seen before—households surviving on virtually no cash income. Edin teamed with Luke Shaefer, an expert on calculating incomes of the poor, to discover that the number of American families living on $2.00 per person, per day, was one and a half million households, including about three million children. Where do these families live? How did they get so desperately poor?
Through this book’s eye-opening analysis and many compelling profiles, moving and startling answers emerge. $2.00 a Day delivers provocative ideas to our national debate on income inequality.

Drug war in America

2024-10-19 15:21:29 UTC

Ive read this at least 3-4 times. Really appreciate this authors perspective on this issue in America and the opportunities that exists to decriminalize drugs, as well as to reassign drug use/abuse from criminal justice system to the medical model.

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts - Maté (2010)

kariblack — 2024-10-19 15:25:28 UTC

Dr. Maté, who for twelve years practiced medicine in Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside – North America’s most concentrated area of drug use, begins by telling the stories of his patients, who, in their destitution and uniformly tragic histories, represent one extreme of the addictive spectrum. With his trademark compassion and unflinching narrative eye, he brings to life their ill-fated and mostly misunderstood struggle for relief or escape, through substance use, from the pain that has tormented them since childhood. He also shows how the behavioural addictions of society’s more fortunate members – including himself – differ only in degree of severity from the drug habits of his Downtown Eastside patients, and how in reality there is only one addiction process, its core objective being the self-soothing of deep-seated fears and discomforts.

White Nationalisms and the Christian Right

2024-10-19 15:26:55 UTC

Incredibly eye opening read on the relationship between the Christian right, and white nationalism, and how those ideological views are impacting the currently political arena, and infiltrating places of power in the US.