Here are 83 books that Sunbelt Blues fans have personally recommended if you like
Sunbelt Blues.
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I grew up in New York City listening to my parents’ stories of extreme hardship and suffering during the Nazi occupation of their native Greece—and the courageous resistance they and many Greeks mounted. I’m outraged by the unfairness of extreme poverty in the midst of plenty and motivated to fight for economic justice. In the early 1980s, as homelessness was first becoming a crisis, I got involved in legal advocacy to address it, first as a volunteer lawyer and then as a full-time advocate. I believe housing is a human right and that no one should be homeless in a country as rich as the US.
I read this book in its entirety while sitting all day in a hospital waiting room on Christmas Eve after taking my husband to the ER that morning. I was scared and anxious and needed something to take my mind off my worries, and this did the trick.
It grabbed my attention, engaged my mind, and was so well written that it was easy to read despite my distress. The sense of outrage threaded throughout the book, backed up by key facts, propelled the book forward and kept me focused. Thankfully, my husband is fully recovered from his broken rib and is fine.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a “provocative and compelling” (NPR) argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it.
“Urgent and accessible . . . Its moral force is a gut punch.”—The New Yorker
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2023: The Washington Post, Time, Esquire, Newsweek, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Elle, Salon, Lit Hub, Kirkus Reviews
The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
I moved to New York City in 1984 as homelessness, and the AIDS epidemic were crises all too visible to this newcomer. To my good fortune, my post-doctoral training included some of the earliest experts on mental illness and homelessness. This work became a career goal that has sustained me through almost 40 years of research using qualitative (in-depth) methods. Obtaining federal funding to support this work and mentoring many graduate students were extra benefits that I cherished. Along the way, I wrote a textbook on qualitative methods (now in its 3rd edition), co-authored a book about Housing First, and traveled to Delhi, India to study their ‘pavement dwellers’.
This book is the first to finally put to rest the blame-the-victim causal explanations for homelessness. Using economic and geographic data, Colburn and Aldern show that homelessness is the result of poverty, but not only poverty; for example, Detroit has low rates of homelessness.
Essential is the existence of economic inequities combined with the unavailability of affordable housing, for example, in New York City. This book makes my teaching about homelessness so much easier.
Using rich and detailed data, this groundbreaking book explains why homelessness has become a crisis in America and reveals the structural conditions that underlie it.
In Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern seek to explain the substantial regional variation in rates of homelessness in cities across the United States. In a departure from many analytical approaches, Colburn and Aldern shift their focus from the individual experiencing homelessness to the metropolitan area. Using accessible statistical analysis, they test a range of conventional beliefs about what drives the prevalence of homelessness in a given city-including mental illness,…
I moved to New York City in 1984 as homelessness, and the AIDS epidemic were crises all too visible to this newcomer. To my good fortune, my post-doctoral training included some of the earliest experts on mental illness and homelessness. This work became a career goal that has sustained me through almost 40 years of research using qualitative (in-depth) methods. Obtaining federal funding to support this work and mentoring many graduate students were extra benefits that I cherished. Along the way, I wrote a textbook on qualitative methods (now in its 3rd edition), co-authored a book about Housing First, and traveled to Delhi, India to study their ‘pavement dwellers’.
The focus of this intensely experienced and written ethnography is contrasting the public vs. private sectors of services for persons suffering the dual tragedies of serious mental illness and housing precarity. The title reflects this distinction by describing the private world of elite treatment programs costing $10,000 or more per month to treat the troubled sons and daughters of Los Angeles families.
In contrast, the public sector—serving 'sidewalk psychotics’ visible in the city’s Skid Row—is barely able to offer treatment and support to help them survive. Gong writes up-close stories of the lives of impoverished street dwellers and their outreach workers juxtaposed to the experiences of affluent young people navigating strained relationships with their families. The comparison speaks volumes about class privilege and its limitations. This is ethnography at its best.
Sociologist Neil Gong explains why mental health treatment in Los Angeles rarely succeeds, for the rich, the poor, and everyone in between.
In 2022, Los Angeles became the US county with the largest population of unhoused people, drawing a stark contrast with the wealth on display in its opulent neighborhoods. In Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics, sociologist Neil Gong traces the divide between the haves and have-nots in the psychiatric treatment systems that shape the life trajectories of people living with serious mental illness. In the decades since the United States closed its mental hospitals in favor of non-institutional treatment,…
When Annie Thornton, midwife and apprentice witch, falls through time to a 15th-century Yorkshire village with her telepathic cat, Rosamund, she befriends Will and Jack, two soldiers returning from the French Wars. Mistress Meg, Annie’s ancestral aunt living in the 15th century, is…
I grew up in New York City listening to my parents’ stories of extreme hardship and suffering during the Nazi occupation of their native Greece—and the courageous resistance they and many Greeks mounted. I’m outraged by the unfairness of extreme poverty in the midst of plenty and motivated to fight for economic justice. In the early 1980s, as homelessness was first becoming a crisis, I got involved in legal advocacy to address it, first as a volunteer lawyer and then as a full-time advocate. I believe housing is a human right and that no one should be homeless in a country as rich as the US.
I liked this book immediately, and not just because it is written by someone I know and have worked with for decades and greatly respect. The book includes parts of the author’s early iconic work on homelessness in New York City, which, when published as a report in 1981, first focused public attention on the then-growing crisis.
The book includes stories of homeless New Yorkers that the author encountered when he lived for a period on the streets, in shelters, and flophouses as part of his research—an approach I found fascinating—as well as scholarly analysis. It’s a rich resource I return to again and again for insight, understanding, and, as needed, inspiration.
"It must be some kind of experiment or something, to see how long people can live without food, without shelter, without security."-homeless woman, Grand Central Station, winter
"Homelessness is a routine fact of life on the margins. Materially, it emerges out of a tangled but unmysterious mix of factors: scarce housing, poorly planned and badly implemented policies of relocation and support, dismal prospects of work, exhausted or alienated kin.... Any outreach worker could tell you that list would be incomplete without one more: how misery can come to prefer its own company."-from the book
After decades writing about how to improve the lives of low-income children through education, I concluded that I had to writing about housing policy too. Government housing laws essentially dictate where kids go to school in America. In addition, since writing in college about Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign for president, in which he brought together a multiracial coalition of working people, I’ve been obsessed with finding ways to bring those groups together again. Reforms of housing policy in a number of states has done just that: united working people across racial lines who were sick of being excluded – by government fiat – from places that provide the best opportunities.
Jenny Schuetz of the Brookings Institution manages in Fixer Upper to pull off two things at once: to provide an authoritative and deeply researched account of how America got into its housing mess; and to convey the material in a way that lay readers can easily grasp.
She finds, among other things, that the worst forms of exclusionary zoning are found not where one would expect them: on the coastal areas which is home to America’s most liberal voters. A smart guide about the problems bedeviling housing policy and what to do about it.
Practical ideas to provide affordable housing to more Americans
Much ink has been spilled in recent years talking about political divides and inequality in the United States. But these discussions too often miss one of the most important factors in the divisions among Americans: the fundamentally unequal nature of the nation’s housing systems. Financially well-off Americans can afford comfortable, stable homes in desirable communities. Millions of other Americans cannot.
And this divide deepens other inequalities. Increasingly, important life outcomes—performance in school, employment, even life expectancy—are determined by where people live and the quality of homes they live in.
I’ve lived in the same place for a long time—a complicated yet beautiful place that I love and love to observe. I’ve seen a lot of change, and a lot of folks come and go in my neighborhood and within the walls of my own house. Looking at a building down the street, I can see it two paint jobs ago, the moods of former owners and friends still imprinted there. I’m becoming a relative old-timer here—while the neighborhood sees repeated turnover, I dig in harder. My long track of settledness has nurtured a tendency to chronicle this humble place, to write one version of its story.
Houses misbehave. They cost too much money. Their dumb little systems break whenever they feel like it. They’re threatened by floods and fires. I can vouch for all of the above. And yet, don’t we dream of THE house that will solve our problems and let our real lives begin?
Never mind that houses tend to make as many problems as they solve; Daum searches far-flung listings for that one soul-completing place while probing the concept of preciousness and her hunt for a perfection that does not exist. Daum's writing is flinty and funny and sees her obsessing over New York City apartments, wildly overextending herself on a Nebraska farmhouse, and finding a beat-up LA bungalow that will never match her vision but is good enough. Take it from me, good enough can be totally right.
The “funny, charming, and shocking” true story (The New York Times Book Review) of one woman's quest for the four perfect walls to call home.
In this laugh-out-loud personal journey, acclaimed author Meghan Daum explores the perils and pleasures of believing that only a house can make you whole. From her teenage apartment fantasies and her mother's decorating manias to her own “hidden room” dreams and the bungalow she eventually buys on her own, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House “[chronicles] an obsession that threatens to upend sanity and bank accounts.... Daum has a rare gift…
Chasing Light is a lyrical meditation on grief, memory, and the fragile beauty of everyday life. At its core, it is a story of resilience, forgiveness, and the transformational power of human connection. It sheds light on the overlooked realities of homelessness and addiction, while emphasizing the importance of compassion…
I’m an American author who lived three years in a backyard tiny house with my family: husband, two young children, and a part-time dog. We wanted to live a bigger life, focused on our favorite activities and most important relationships. I wrote this book during the first spring of COVID-19, partly as a way to record my family’s experience weathering a pandemic in under 300 square feet, and partly as a way to explore the ways that children can be resourceful when life gives them a pinch. I've been a writer for most of my life, and I love to teach writing. Ark is my first middle-grade novel, and my lucky thirteenth book to publish!
When she is bested by the overwhelming expense of paying for a bedroom in Britain, the author returns home to Cornwall, where she fixes up her father’s old work shed and there takes up residency.
A potent real-life story about a community that is so loved by vacationers that it loses its accessibility for locals, and about a young woman who finds an unusual way to make a home there, with hardly a wall separating her from the elements—especially the wild-surf ocean—that she feels she must live near in order to survive.
The story of a personal housing crisis that led to a discovery of the true value of home.
*'You will marvel at the beauty of this book, and rage at the injustice it reveals' George Monbiot*
*'Incredibly moving. To find peace and a sense of home after a life so profoundly affected by the housing crisis, is truly inspirational' Raynor Winn, bestselling author of The Salt Path*
Aged thirty-one, Catrina Davies was renting a box-room in a house in Bristol, which she shared with four other adults and a child. Working several jobs and never knowing if she could make…
Typically, we follow sports only on the playing field. I share that interest but I’ve become fascinated by sports off the field, and how they influence and reflect American society. After my fanatical baseball-playing childhood, I pursued an academic career, teaching and writing books and essays on politics and history, and wondering why it wasn’t more rewarding. Then I rediscovered sports, and returned again to my childhood passion of baseball. I began teaching a popular baseball course as a mirror on American culture. And I began writing about baseball and society, recently completing my sixth baseball book. The books recommended here will help readers to see baseball with new eyes.
Off the playing field, baseball has both influenced and helped shape American society.
I loved this book because it told the neglected story of how a sports team can profoundly affect its surrounding community. Here is the insider tale of the move by the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in the 1950s, the politics that helped shape that move, and the consequences for these two cities.
In Brooklyn, a fanatical fan base was betrayed and in Los Angeles a Mexican-American community was rudely displaced for the new ballpark. It’s a compelling story of winners and losers.
A story about baseball, family, the American Dream, and the fight to turn Los Angeles into a big league city.
Dodger Stadium is an American icon. But the story of how it came to be goes far beyond baseball. The hills that cradle the stadium were once home to three vibrant Mexican American communities. In the early 1950s, those communities were condemned to make way for a utopian public housing project. Then, in a remarkable turn, public housing in the city was defeated amidst a Red Scare conspiracy.
Instead of getting their homes back, the remaining residents saw the city…
I grew up in Tanzania, where I discovered the importance of learning first-hand from ordinary people about their lives by accompanying my mother, who was an anthropologist, when she carried out participant observation among coastal people. Much later in my own research, I could see how essential it was to interact with people face-to-face and learn about their aspirations, joys, fears, daily struggles, and creative ways of coping with the challenges of an economy in free fall. I learned to look beyond the “economic data” to more fully appreciate the humanity of the people involved. All of these books I selected are by people who learned about the real urban economy in this way.
Ela Bhatt, a former Member of the Indian parliament, chronicles the astonishing rise of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) ,which she helped form in 1972.
The overwhelming majority of the labor force in India is self-employed and the majority of the self-employed are women. Today SEWA works in 18 Indian states and is made up of 2.1 million informal women workers — the single largest union of informal sector workers in the world.
In this first-hand account, Bhatt shows how the organization struggled against cultural norms, the state, and formal unions, and challenged the rise of Hindu nationalism as it mobilized women across religious lines and caste in the state of Gujarat, which has experienced decades of Hindu-Muslim violence.
This book is a first-hand account of the vision, rise, and success of SEWA, the Self-Employed Women's Association, a trade union of self-employed women in India. It takes the reader into an up-close look at these women's daily lives, at the forces that overpower them, the conditions that perpetuate their poverty, the battles they fight, the attitudes they face and the working and living conditions of both rural and urban working women. It highlights the role that trade cooperatives play in economic development and shows the impact of the larger economy on the lives of the women.
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman
by
Alexis Krasilovsky,
Kate from Jules et Jim meets I Love Dick.
A young woman filmmaker’s journey of self-discovery, set against a backdrop of the sexual liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman, we follow Ana Fried as she faces the ultimate…
I grew up in New York City listening to my parents’ stories of extreme hardship and suffering during the Nazi occupation of their native Greece—and the courageous resistance they and many Greeks mounted. I’m outraged by the unfairness of extreme poverty in the midst of plenty and motivated to fight for economic justice. In the early 1980s, as homelessness was first becoming a crisis, I got involved in legal advocacy to address it, first as a volunteer lawyer and then as a full-time advocate. I believe housing is a human right and that no one should be homeless in a country as rich as the US.
I loved this book, even as it made me so angry at the way this country treats workers who are, in fact, essential. I read it years ago, before I met and got to know its author, and was immediately swept up by its remarkable but very simple premise: entering incognito into low-wage working life in communities across the country—and writing about it.
I was fascinated by this raw, behind-the-scenes look at the ugly underside of restaurants, hotels, and big box stores, among other staples of American life. I was engaged by the author’s authentic and distinctive voice. I felt like I was listening to a friend recount, in detail, her visit to a strange yet also familiar land.
In this now classic work, Barbara Ehrenreich, our sharpest and most original social critic, goes "undercover" as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of American prosperity.
Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich 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, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever…
