Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America is a 2001 nonfiction book written by Barbara Ehrenreich. This book is considered a classic of investigative journalism and was ranked #13 in The Guardian’s list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. Ehrenreich takes a series of low-paying, entry-level jobs in three cities (Key West, Florida; Portland, Maine; Minneapolis, Minnesota) to answer the question of whether one can survive on these wages and... Read Nickel and Dimed Summary

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One Foot in Eden is a 2002 crime novel by Ron Rash. Rash employs a blend of Southern Gothic and detective fiction to create suspense and explore the psychological inner conflict of the characters. The novel follows five different narrators as the people of Jocassee, South Carolina, discover the murder of Holland Winchester. As the investigation continues, the characters must come to terms with the displacement of their community while Carolina Power evicts the inhabitants... Read One Foot in Eden Summary

One Size Fits None: A Farm Girl’s Search for the Promise of Regenerative Agriculture is a 2019 book on how the American food production system must move beyond conventional and sustainable farming to embrace regenerative farming strategies tailored to individual environments. Anderson, who grew up on a conventional ranch outside of Bison, South Dakota, has firsthand knowledge of US conventional farming strategies. As a young journalist for the Tri-State Neighbor newspaper, she started off wanting... Read One Size Fits None Summary

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On the Come Up, published in 2019, is the second novel by acclaimed young adult author Angie Thomas. It takes place in the same neighborhood as Thomas’s first novel, The Hate U Give (2017), but aside from occasional references to the murder and riots in Garden Heights, On the Come Up features a new cast of characters. The book received numerous awards, including the American Library Association’s Top Ten Books for Young Adults, and it... Read On the Come Up Summary

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Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s short story collection Sabrina & Corina (2019) centers the lives of Latinx, Indigenous women and their daily struggles, including poverty, racism, and addictions of various kinds. All of the stories take place in Colorado.Plot SummaryIn “Sugar Babies,” preteen Sierra struggles with coming to terms with her mother, who was a teen mother who abandoned her when she was a child. In school, Sierra is forced to participate in an exercise in which she... Read Sabrina & Corina: Stories Summary

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Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves (2015) is a work of speculative fiction that blends hard science fiction with political and social commentary. Known for his meticulous research and technical expertise, Stephenson crafts a narrative that begins with the sudden destruction of the moon and follows humanity’s desperate attempts to survive the ensuing Hard Rain: a millennia-long bombardment of debris that renders Earth’s surface uninhabitable. Divided into three parts spanning thousands of years, Seveneves traces both the immediate... Read Seveneves Summary

Shoe Dog is a first-person memoir written by Nike cofounder Phil Knight. It was published in 2016. Shoe Dog primarily recounts the events from 1962, the year Knight traveled around the world as a young man, to 1980, the year Nike went public and Knight became a multimillionaire. The years in between are comprised of the struggles and challenges Knight faced as he worked to build the company that would ultimately be known worldwide as... Read Shoe Dog Summary

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is widely regarded as a foundational text of the 20th century environmental movement. Originally published as a series in The New Yorker, Carson’s essays carefully articulate the impacts of widespread chemical use for insect and plant control. Throughout the text, Carson emphasizes the ways that humans disregard the interrelation of species on earth, and argues that as a result, humans are at a pivotal moment. If methods of insect control are... Read Silent Spring Summary

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Published in 2014, Station Eleven is the fourth novel by Emily St. John Mandel (The Glass Hotel, Sea of Tranquility). The book won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Toronto Book Award, and was shortlisted or nominated for several others. Set in a post-apocalyptic future where a flu outbreak decimates the world’s population, the book is sometimes categorized as science fiction, although it does not feature any fictional technology; its protagonists’ involvement in a traveling... Read Station Eleven Summary