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7 Books That Show the Truth About Poverty

Let's enlighten ourselves before we engage in class warfare.

Looking out onto the landscape of 2020, we see the makings of a historic year–but not in the best ways. Natural disasters like bushfires, earthquakes, and hurricanes are becoming more common and worsening in intensity, and the divide between the rich and the poor keeps growing. In fact, over 38 million Americans live in poverty. But before we can discuss how to rectify the problem (let alone who's to blame for the institutional failures), we as a culture have a weak understanding of what poverty entails. Some critics mock millennials for not being able to afford iced coffee and avocado toast, while in actuality they're the poorest generation since World War II, having felt the financial strains of a recession and inflation. Meanwhile, elderly boomers are facing dire circumstances as they're looking to retire amidst an economy that can't sustain them.

The problem, of course, is that unless you've been young and coming-of-age under the weight of the economy's institutional failures and also entered the twilight of your life to find your savings unsustainable for modern living, you don't know what those experiences are like.

So before we engage in our next argument about the state of the world, let's enlighten ourselves with these books that illuminate the truth about poverty.

Betty Smith's "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" (1943)

Betty Smith based her iconic coming-of-age novel on her own experiences growing up in a poor Williamsburg neighborhood. The protagonist's struggles are punctuated with alternating tenderness and bitterness, turning Smith's novel into an American classic.

The Food Gap is a Perfect Indictment of The Way We Treat Poverty

The food gap isn't going anywhere.

In the United States, there is a positive correlation between income and one's ability to eat a nutritious diet. It's been stated again and again; eating healthy, well-balanced meals is expensive, a luxury for the rich. While the population as a whole is eating clean-er than they were twenty years ago, the disparity between the kinds of groceries poor and rich people eat is widening. It's not only affording quality food that's the problem, however. In certain low-income areas, it's impossible to even access healthy groceries, leading to creation of food deserts.

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