Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, the author decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job, any job, can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, she left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from...

"From the beet fields of North Dakota to the National Forest campgrounds of California to Amazon's CamperForce program in Texas, employers have discovered a new, low-cost labor pool, made up largely of transient older Americans. Finding that social security comes up short, often underwater on mortgages, these invisible casualties of the Great Recession have taken to the road by the tens of thousands in late-model RVs, travel trailers, and vans, forming...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Arab and Jew, an intimate portrait unfolds of working American families struggling against insurmountable odds to escape poverty.
"This is clearly one of those seminal books that every American should read and read now." —The New York Times Book Review
As David K. Shipler makes clear in this powerful, humane study, the invisible

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Scope and content: Annual reports from the Nashville Housing Authority (NHA) and the Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency (MDHA) from 1938 to 1996 (some years missing) and two project-specific reports on Capitol Hill Redevelopment Project (c. 1952) and Edgehill Redevelopment and Renewal Project (c. 1964). The collection documents the activities and mission of the Nashville Housing Authority and the Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency...