Online Book Display

As growing economic and racial inequality continues to shape American society, homelessness remains an urgent issue. Embedded in American history, and more recently exacerbated by the 2008 financial and housing crisis, a new wave of homelessness has emerged as the U.S. has faced surging evictions throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The essays in this volume explore homelessness both as the literal state of being unsheltered and as the modern and contemporary condition of being and/or feeling estranged from society. They also reflect on the meaning of home in relation to race, class, gender, migration and mobility in an American and transnational context.

The hidden problem of student hunger on college campuses is real. Here's how colleges and universities are addressing it. As the price of college continues to rise and the incomes of most Americans stagnate, too many college students are going hungry. According to researchers, approximately half of all undergraduates are food insecure. Food Insecurity on Campus--the first book to describe the problem--meets higher education's growing demand to tackle the pressing question "How can we end student hunger?"

The last thirty years have witnessed an urban renaissance in America. Major cities have managed to drive down the murder rate, improve the schools, restore the built environment, and revitalize their economies. Middle class families are putting down roots in neighborhoods once given up for dead. After explaining why homelessness persists in America and correcting popular misconceptions about the issue, Eide offers concrete recommendations for how we can do better for the homeless population.

The proliferation of food deserts, especially across America's rural landscapes and in its urban centers, has eroded many families'access to food. Market pressures privilege large food distributors and wealthy communities while economic instability compounds the food security crisis assailing the world's wealthiest economy, its third largest agricultural producer, and its leading agricultural exporter. Many Americans across the United States are hungry, finding it increasingly more difficult to reliably feed their families while public programs designed to fight food insecurity face budget cuts.

Whose fault is homelessness? Thirty years ago the problem exploded as a national crisis, drawing the attention of activists, the media, and policymakers at all levels--yet the homeless population endures to this day, and arguably has grown. David Wagner offers a major reconsideration of homelessness in the US, casting a critical eye on how we as a society respond to crises of inequality and stratification. Incorporating local studies into a national narrative, Wagner probes how homelessness shifted from being the subject of a politically charged controversy over poverty and social class to posing a functional question of social-service delivery.

A description of the current global food system, this book challenges our ethical responsibility to the global poor and implicates us all for failing to curb global hunger and malnutrition. The Politics of Food argues that our current global food system constitutes a massive violation of human rights. In this impassioned, well-researched book, William Schanbacher makes the case that the food security model for combating global hunger--driven by the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and other organizations--is a failure, too dependent on trade and too reliant on international agribusiness. Instead, the emerging model of food sovereignty--helping local farmers and businesses produce better quality food--is the more effective and responsible approach.

In a metropolis like New York, homelessness can blend into the urban landscape. For editor Susan Greenfield, however, New York is the place where a community of resilient, remarkable individuals are yearning for a voice. Sacred Shelter follows the lives of thirteen formerly homeless people, all of whom have graduated from the life skills empowerment program, an interfaith life skills program for homeless and formerly homeless individuals in New York. Through frank, honest interviews, these individuals share traumas from their youth, their experience with homelessness, and the healing they have discovered through community and faith.

This detailed analysis of the global food system looks at the way food is produced, distributed, and consumed in an effort to create a more equitable and healthful system worldwide. With large-scale famine afflicting regions around the globe and overconsumption and unhealthy eating habits destroying others, many are beginning to wonder if access to food is less of a class-based social problem and more of an ethical issue affecting the lives--and livelihoods--of people all over the world. This thoughtful text provides a thorough examination of the factors contributing to this global concern, exploring the complexities of international food supply and demand as well as the efforts to bring about a more just global food system.

A call to action that will reenergize the national debate on the federal government's priorities, Growing Up Empty is advocacy journalism at its best. In 1981, President Reagan incongruously announced to the world that there were no hungry souls in the richest nation in the world, that poverty had been virtually wiped out. But Schwartz-Nobel had found a different story in America's communities, As she tracked this hidden political and emotional battle, she was shocked to find that hunger is deeper and wider than she could have imagined, that it has reached epic proportions. It is running rampant through urban, rural and suburban communities, affecting blacks, whites, Asians, Christians, Jews and nonbelievers alike. And it is getting worse.

Despite billions of government dollars spent in the attempt, we are no closer than we were three decades ago to solving the problem of homelessness. Why? Tackling these questions, the authors of Ending Homelessness explore the complicated and often dysfunctional relationship between efforts to address homelessness and the realities on the street.