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 humanitarian leader with more than two decades of experience working for the United Nations takes aim at the global food crisis—revealing how hunger anywhere affects lives everywhere and what steps we can take to change course. "This book should be required reading for the entire human race." —Jonathan Safran Foer, author of We Are the Weather At the turn of the twenty-first century, more than 150 countries pledged to eradicate hunger by 2030. But with only a few years left, we’re far from reaching that goal. Instead, hunger is on the rise—America itself recently experienced levels of food insecurity not seen since the Great Depression. How could the richest nation in the world have so many people going hungry? In The New Breadline, aid worker and activist Jean-Martin Bauer unravels this paradox. Bauer’s family fled to America during the terrors of the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti. Now on the brink of mass starvation, Haiti and its grim history inspired Bauer to make food justice his life's work. During his long career with the UN, Bauer learned firsthand that the problem of hunger is always political—and like all political conditions, hunger, he knew, was something we could work to change. Drawing from his fieldwork in the most hunger-prone countries across the globe—from Haiti, where elites hoard imported French cheese, to Madagascar, where foreign corporations are snatching up valuable land from local farmers, to right here in America, where the lines at food banks continue to grow—Bauer weaves profound personal insight with a keen understanding of the structural systems of racism, classism, and sexism that thwart true progress in the battle against hunger. The New Breadline is an inspiring call to action to end what he persuasively argues is one of the greatest threats to our society, boldly envisioning a world where we can always feed ourselves and one another.
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.
An essential tool for assisting leisure readers interested in topics surrounding food, this unique book contains annotations and read-alikes for hundreds of nonfiction titles about the joys of comestibles and cooking. Food Lit: A Reader's Guide to Epicurean Nonfiction provides a much-needed resource for librarians assisting adult readers interested in the topic of food—a group that is continuing to grow rapidly. Containing annotations of hundreds of nonfiction titles about food that are arranged into genre and subject interest categories for easy reference, the book addresses a diversity of reading experiences by covering everything from foodie memoirs and histories of food to extreme cuisine and food exposés. Author Melissa Stoeger has organized and described hundreds of nonfiction titles centered on the themes of food and eating, including life stories, history, science, and investigative nonfiction. The work emphasizes titles published in the past decade without overlooking significant benchmark and classic titles. It also provides lists of suggested read-alikes for those titles, and includes several helpful appendices of fiction titles featuring food, food magazines, and food blogs.
Life Adrift critically engages with two of the most defining issues of our contemporary global political economy: migration and climate change. In their own right, both are discrete areas of politics, theory, practice, and resistance. But as climate and migration are increasingly imagined together as a singular relation, they are giving rise to new horizons of meaning in politics, philosophy, media, art and literature. Life Adrift is a collection of essays from across the interpretive social sciences and humanities which treats climate change and migration as a relation that demands theoretical and historical explanation, rather than a problem requiring technical and expert solutions. The result is a unique collection, offering readers a means for reconceptualising migration and environmental changes as a site of politics and of political possibility. Along the way it addresses a range of topics current in cultural and political theory, including democracy, place, neoliberalism, humanism, materiality, borders, affect, race and sexuality. If climate change stands to redistribute humans and material across the globe, then Life Adrift offers a set of critical resources for analysing this coming phenomenon and reimaging what it might mean to be political in a fully immanent world of bodies in flux.
As the first black female television journalist in the western United States, Belva Davis overcame the obstacles of racism and sexism, and helped change the face and focus of television news. Now she is sharing the story of her extraordinary life in her poignantly honest memoir, Never in My Wildest Dreams. A reporter for almost five decades, Davis is no stranger to adversity. Born to a 15-year-old Louisiana laundress during the Great Depression, and raised in the overcrowded projects of Oakland, California, Davis suffered abuse, battled rejection, and persevered to achieve a career beyond her imagination. Davis has seen the world change in ways she never could have envisioned, from being verbally and physically attacked while reporting on the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco to witnessing the historic election of Barack Obama in 2008. Davis worked her way up to reporting on many of the most explosive stories of recent times, including the Vietnam War protests, the rise and fall of the Black Panthers, the Peoples Temple cult mass suicides at Jonestown, the assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the onset of the AIDS epidemic, and the aftermath of the terrorist attacks that first put Osama bin Laden on the FBI's Most Wanted List. She encountered a cavalcade of cultural icons: Malcolm X, Frank Sinatra, James Brown, Ronald Reagan, Huey Newton, Muhammad Ali, Alex Haley, Fidel Castro, Dianne Feinstein, Condoleezza Rice, and others. Throughout her career, Davis soldiered in the trenches in the battle for racial equality and brought stories of black Americans out of the shadows and into the light of day. Still active in her 70s, Davis, the "Walter Cronkite of the Bay Area," now hosts a weekly news roundtable and special reports at KQED, one of the nation's leading PBS stations. In this way she has remained relevant and engaged in the stories of today, while offering her anecdote-rich perspective on the decades that have shaped us. "No people can say they understand the times in which they have lived unless they have read this book." -- Dr. Maya Angelou.
