Twenty-five million Americans--nearly 9 percent of the U.S. population--rely on food pantries. Another 13 million aren't linked to a food distribution network, and 14 million children are at risk of going hungry on any given day. Moreover, the faltering economy is increasing the number of American families that don't know where their next meals are coming from. Breadline USA treats this crisis not only as matter of failed policies, but also as a portrait of real human suffering. Investigative reporter Sasha Abramsky focuses attention on the people behind the statistics--the families caught up in circumstances beyond their control. Breadline USA is a vivid reminder of the fate to which many more Americans may be subject without urgent action.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Fifty years after Michael Harrington published his groundbreaking book The Other America , in which he chronicled the lives of people excluded from the Age of Affluence, poverty in America is back with a vengeance. It is made up of both the long-term chronically poor and new working poor—the tens of millions of victims of a broken economy and an ever more dysfunctional political system. In many ways, for the majority of Americans, financial insecurity has become the new norm. The American Way of Poverty shines a light on this travesty. Sasha Abramsky brings the effects of economic inequality out of the shadows and, ultimately, suggests ways for moving toward a fairer and more equitable social contract. Exploring everything from housing policy to wage protections and affordable higher education, Abramsky lays out a panoramic blueprint for a reinvigorated political process that, in turn, will pave the way for a renewed War on Poverty. It is, Harrington believed, a moral outrage that in a country as wealthy as America, so many people could be so poor. Written in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, in an era of grotesque economic extremes, The American Way of Poverty brings that same powerful indignation to the topic.