Books like People and folks by John Hagedorn

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s “Random Family” immerses readers in a decade of life in New York’s Bronx, following the intertwined paths of young mothers, adolescents, and crime‑involved teens while exposing the pressing social conditions of urban poverty.

A young white woman's journey into a black community to study the family support systems coping with poverty, debunking the misconception that poor families were unstable and disorganized.

Tally's Corner examines the lived reality of the urban poor in Washington, D.C., challenging the culture of poverty thesis and exploring how the absence of black men, economic shifts, and social conditions shape African American community life.

Anthropologist's tape-recorded documentary in which each of five members of a slum-dwelling Mexico City family tells about their lives. Once or twice in every generation a scientific work appears which has the immediacy and force of great literature. The Children of Sanchez is such a book. It brings us in touch with the lives of its subjects in such a way that the reader is drawn into their world as if he were reading a great novel. This is an intimate account of an actual family from the slums of Mexico City. The story they tell is in their own words. The reader learns not only what it is like to grow up in a one-room home in a slum tenement in the heart of a great modern city, but, insofar as the lives in this book may be generalized, about the culture of poverty throughout the world--the culture shared by 80% of the world's people. The lives of the Sanchez family reveal a world of violence and death, of suffering and brutality, of broken homes and the cruelty of the poor to the poor. But they reveal, too, an intensity of feeling and human warmth, a sense of individuality, a capacity for joy, a hope for a better life, a desire for sympathy and love, a readiness to share the little they possess, and the courage to carry on in the face of great adversity.--From publisher description.

A powerful, unvarnished chronicle of Rosa Lee Cunningham’s life and her family’s struggle with poverty, drug addiction, and urban hardship in Washington, D.C., as seen through the sustained journalistic eye of Leon Dash.