I have decided to start a book of the day series on this blog. Each day for the rest of the month, I intend to make a post about a poverty-related book that interests me. I have not read any of these books yet. (If I had, I would have already posted about them when I read them.) I hope to read most of them eventually, but it will take me a while since they will not be the only books that I will be reading.
Better yet, I assume some people reading these posts will purchase and read one or more of the books. From an activist perspective, I think it will be a great way to raise awareness and spread information about poverty. Also, I have a relationship with BookCloseouts, so, when any of you purchase any of these books from BookCloseouts by following the links that I post on this blog, then some of the revenue will help fund this blog.
I will still make my regular blog posts too. These poverty book of the day posts will be extra. 🙂
Anyway, today’s poverty book of the day is Loretta Schwartz-Nobel’s book, Growing Up Empty: How Federal Policies Are Starving America’s Children. Take a look at the overview:
“Growing Up Empty is a study of the hidden hunger epidemic that still remains largely unacknowledged at the highest political levels and ‘an unforgettable exploration of public policy, its failures and its victims’ (William Raspberry, Washington Post). Twenty years after Ronald Reagan declared that hunger was no longer an American problem, Schwartz-Nobel shows that hunger has reached epic proportions, running rampant through urban, rural, and suburban communities, affecting blacks, whites, Asians, Christians and Jews, and nonbelievers alike. Among the people we come to know are the new homeless. Born of the “Welfare to Work” program, these working poor have jobs but do not make enough to support their families, such as the formerly middle-class housewife reduced to stealing in order to feed her children, or the soldier fighting on our front lines while his young wife stands in bread lines and is denied benefits and baby formula at a military health clinic. With skillful investigative reporting and a novelist’s humanitarian eye for detail, Schwartz-Nobel portrays a haunting reality of human suffering that need not exist. A call to action, Growing Up Empty is advocacy journalism at its best.”