Books like Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks

Jeannette Walls' memoir chronicles her turbulent childhood in a dysfunctional, itinerant family, detailing poverty, alcoholism, and homelessness across the United States as she seeks stability and personal growth.

Barbara Ehrenreich explores the realities of low‑wage work by living in sweatshops, hostels, and retail in three U.S. cities during the late 1990s.

Linda Tirado’s memoir chronicles her journey from middle‑class comfort to the working poor, offering a candid, humorous look at poverty and social class in America.

Stephanie Land’s memoir chronicles her descent into poverty and her determined climb back, offering a candid view of the hardships faced by single mothers in modern America.

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.

"A revelatory account of poverty in America so deep that we, as a country, don't think it exists Jessica Compton's family of four would have no cash income unless she donated plasma twice a week at her local donation center in Tennessee. Modonna Harris and her teenage daughter Brianna in Chicago often have no food but spoiled milk on weekends. After two decades of brilliant research on American poverty, Kathryn Edin noticed something she hadn't seen since the mid-1990s -- households surviving on virtually no income. Edin teamed with Luke Shaefer, an expert on calculating incomes of the poor, to discover that the number of American families living on $2.00 per person, per day, has skyrocketed to 1.5 million American households, including about 3 million children. Where do these families live? How did they get so desperately poor? Edin has "turned sociology upside down" (Mother Jones) with her procurement of rich -- and truthful -- interviews. Through the book's many compelling profiles, moving and startling answers emerge. The authors illuminate a troubling trend: a low-wage labor market that increasingly fails to deliver a living wage, and a growing but hidden landscape of survival strategies among America's extreme poor. More than a powerful expose, $2.00 a Day delivers new evidence and new ideas to our national debate on income inequality. "--