Central Skagit Library District

"The Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a new and bracing argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it. The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and...

"In this powerful work of narrative nonfiction, Desmond documents the months he spent living alongside tenants and landlords in Milwaukee, exploring the issues of poverty and homelessness in a segregated city. Taking readers on a journey into the daily lives of families facing eviction, sometimes repeatedly, the author creates a compelling and heartbreaking work that leaves readers wondering how we got here and what we can do to help."--http://lj.libraryjournal.com. "In...

From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, this book is a probing look at the struggles of America's white working class through the author's own story of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town. Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis -- that of poor, white Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for over forty years, has been reported with growing frequency...

In the 1930s, fresh from a stint in the Royal Navy Reserve, and against the wishes of his disapproving father, Fingal O'Reilly goes to Dublin to study medicine. Fingal and his fellow aspiring doctors face the arduous demands of Trinity College and Sir Patrick Dun's Hospital. The hours are long and the cases challenging, but Fingal manages to find time to play rugby, and to romance a fetching, gray-eyed nurse named Kitty O'Hallorhan.

At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. Cyril's son Danny and his older sister Maeve are exiled from...

Welcome to Nowhere, Arizona, the least livable town in the United States. For Gus, a bright 13-year-old with dreams of getting out and going to college, life there is made even worse by Bo Taylor, Nowhere's biggest, baddest bully. When Bo tries to force Gus to eat a dangerously spiny cactus, Rossi Scott, one of the best racers in Nowhere, comes to his rescue--but in return she has to give Bo her prized dirt bike. Determined to buy it back, Gus agrees...

After the ice cream stand where she works is robbed, seventeen-year-old Minerva Gutiérrez plans to get revenge on her predatory boss while navigating grief, anger, and dreams of escape from her dead-end hometown.

Award-winning photographer and filmmaker Nance Ackerman invites us into the lives of this determined family for an intimate and touching experience of child poverty in one of the richest countries in the world. Ackerman spent two years with Isaiah years after the House of Commons promised “to eliminate poverty among Canadian children,” 8-year-old Isaiah is trying hard to grow up healthy, smart and well adjusted despite the odds stacked against...

In a society where materialism reigns, what is the real secret to happiness? Award-winning filmmaker Daniel Karslake (For the Bible Tells Me So) tells the unforgettable stories of five regular folks – a boy, a college student, a thirty-something and two seniors – whose lives went from ordinary to extraordinary based on one simple decision: to engage. Each chose action over apathy, and in the process, each one has had a significant and lasting...

This documentary takes a rare and intimate look at the life of a 73 year old pensioner currently living in Bulgaria following the collapse of the former Soviet Union. We follow Ephtim D. from the meager dinner table where he and his wife dine on some bread with a little margerine and garlic, to the park where he walks his dog and meets his friends.