Atascadero Library: Bookdrops will be closed until further notice. No overdue fines will be charged for items returned late. Library materials may only be returned during normal business hours.
La biblioteca de Atascadero: El Depósito de Libros permanecerá cerrado hasta nuevo aviso. Los materiales de la biblioteca solo se pueden devolver durante el horario comercial normal.
Arroyo Grande Library: Sections of the parking lots will be closed intermittently for paving through January 1, 2025. For more information, call the library at 805-473-7161.
Due to the paving, the Arroyo Grande Bookdrop will be closed December 2nd - December 30th.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a new and bracing argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it. The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and...
"Richard R. Troxell's book Short Stories in a Long Journey blends his personal story with the life of an activist for ending and preventing homelessness. This book highlights the structural defects in our system and laws and proposes common-sense economic solutions to the problems of homelessness and substance abuse, such as the Universal Living Wage to address income inequality, a modest liquor surcharge to finance substance treatment, and a bronze...
"Louisiana, 1875: In the tumultuous aftermath of Reconstruction, three young women set off as unwilling companions on a perilous quest: Lavinia, the pampered heir to a now-destitute plantation; Juneau Jane, her illegitimate free-born Creole half-sister; and Hannie, Lavinia's former slave. Each carries private wounds and powerful secrets as they head for Texas, following dangerous roads rife with ruthless vigilantes and soldiers still fighting a war...
"As former staffer to Robert F. Kennedy and current Georgetown law professor Peter Edelman explains in Not a Crime to Be Poor, Ferguson is everywhere in America today. Through money bail systems, fees and fines, strictly enforced laws and regulations against behavior including trespassing and public urination that largely affect the homeless, and the substitution of prisons and jails for the mental hospitals that have traditionally served the impoverished,...
Explains how global poverty began with military conquest, slavery, and colonization that resulted in the seizure of land, minerals, and forced labor. Today's financial crisis is a direct consequence of these unchallenged policies that have lasted centuries. Features expert insights from Nobel Prize winners, acclaimed authors, university professors, government ministers, and the leaders of social movements. Includes interviews, photo galleries, and...
"In this sparkling and provocative book, economics writer Annie Lowrey examines the UBI movement from many angles. She travels to Kenya to see how a UBI is lifting the poorest people on earth out of destitution, India to see how inefficient government programs are failing the poor, South Korea to interrogate UBI's intellectual pedigree, and Silicon Valley to meet the tech titans financing UBI pilots in expectation of a world with advanced artificial...
Americans are facing sticker shock at every turn: from the gas pump to the grocery store and every kind of consumer service. But the eye-popping price increases are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the threat to the country's economic recovery. Inflation showers windfalls on the rich while penalizing workers, savers, retirees, small businesses, and most of Main Street economic life. New York Times bestselling author and former investment manager...
"Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose." Demon Copperhead is set in the mountains of southern Appalachia. It’s the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves...
Angry and humiliated when his sharecropper father is jailed for stealing food for his family, a young black boy grows in courage and understanding by learning to read and with the help of the devoted dog Sounder.
An introduction to poverty and hunger answers such questions as what hunger and poverty are, how people around the world are affected by both, and how readers can help them.
As TacoPizza FryDay approaches, Stacey can't wait for the last lunchtime of the week, but when she discovers some of her classmates can't afford to eat, she and her friends, with the help of their community, devise a plan to make their voices heard—and to make a difference.
"[The author] takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the 20 dollars a month she has left after paying for their rundown apartment. Scott is a gentle nurse consumed by a heroin addiction. Lamar, a man with no legs and a neighborhood full of boys to look after, tries to work his way out of debt. Vanetta participates in a botched...
"I've been waiting for this book for a long time. Well, not this book, because I never imagined that the book I was waiting for would be so devastatingly smart and funny, so consistently entertaining and unflinchingly on target. In fact, I would like to have written it myself - if, that is, I had lived Linda Tirado's life and extracted all the hard lessons she has learned. I am the author of Nickel and Dimed, which tells the story of my own brief...
At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. Cyril's son Danny and his older sister Maeve are exiled from...
"Donna writes, "I heard we are not our stories; yet, I became a part of mine ? some anyway ? without intention. History changed me more than once. Those past events hold hands with my soul." Since her days of briefly living in a township under South Africa?s apartheid regime to the inhumanity of being homeless in America, readers will be tied closely to the author's vivid story-telling, beginning with the Prologue?s dream sequence. Donna's homeless...