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"The promise that you can "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is central to the story of the American Dream. It's the belief that if you work hard and rely on your own resources, you will eventually succeed. However time and again we have seen how this foundational myth, with it's emphasis on individual determination, brittle self-sufficiency, and personal accomplishment, does not help us. Instead, as income inequality rises around us, we are left...
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"With a great reporter's narrative skill and the storytelling ability of a novelist, acclaimed journalist Sam Quinones weaves together two tales of capitalism catastrophically run amok. The unfettered prescribing of pain medications during the 1990s reached its peak in Purdue Pharma's campaign to market OxyContin, its new, expensive--extremely addictive--miracle painkiller. Meanwhile, a massive influx of black tar heroin--cheap, potent, and originating...
3) To paradise
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AANHPI 2023 - Adult
AAPI Fiction
Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month (WPL-ADULT)
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AAPI Fiction
Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month (WPL-ADULT)
More Lists...
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"In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, where people may live and love whomever they please (or so it seems). The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists betrothal to a worthy suitor, drawn to a charming music teacher of no means. In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with his much older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate of his...
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"Mike Muñoz is a young Mexican American not too many years out of high school--and just fired from his latest gig as a lawn boy on a landscaping crew. Though he tries time and again to get his foot on the first rung of that ladder to success, he can't seem to get a break. But then things start to change for Mike, and after a raucous, jarring, and challenging trip, he finds he can finally see the future and his place in it"--
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"For fourteen years, Letty Espinosa has worked three jobs around San Francisco to make ends meet while her mother raised her children--Alex, now fifteen, and Luna, six--in their tiny apartment on a forgotten spit of wetlands near the bay. But now Letty's parents are returning to Mexico, and Letty must step up and become a mother for the first time in her life. Navigating this new terrain is challenging for Letty, especially as Luna desperately misses...
6) Gold diggers
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"An Indian-American serio-comic and magical realist epic love story about the perils of ambition, tracing the mysterious alchemy of its characters' transformation from high school in an Atlanta suburb through young adulthood in the Bay Area"--
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"JJ Ferguson has returned home to Pinewood, North Carolina, to build his dream house and to pursue his high school sweetheart, Ava. But as he reenters his former world, where factories are in decline and the legacy of Jim Crow is still felt, he's startled to find that the people he once knew and loved have changed just as much as he has. Ava is now married and desperate for a baby, though she can't seem to carry one to term. Her husband, Henry, has...
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"Eighteen-year-old Shelley, born into a much-despised branch of the Zheng family in Yunnan Province and living in the shadow of his widowed father's grief, dreams of bigger things. Buoyed by an exuberant heart and his cousin Deng's tall tales about the United States, Shelley heads to San Francisco to claim his destiny, confident that any hurdles will be easily overcome by the awesome powers of the "Chinese groove," a belief in the unspoken bonds between...
10) The four winds
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"Texas, 1921. A time of abundance. The Great War is over, the bounty of the land is plentiful, and America is on the brink of a new and optimistic era. But for Elsa Wolcott, deemed too old to marry in a time when marriage is a woman's only option, the future seems bleak. Until the night she meets Rafe Martinelli and decides to change the direction of her life. With her reputation in ruin, there is only one respectable choice: marriage to a man she...
11) Live by night
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In 1926, during the Prohibition, Joe Coughlin defies his strict law-and-order upbringing by climbing a ladder of organized crime that takes him from Boston to Cuba where he encounters a dangerous cast of characters who are all fighting for their piece of the American dream. By 1926, Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston...
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An immigrant family gets caught in the middle of a criminal investigation in this pulsating debut, perfect for readers of Everything I Never Told You and Ask Again, Yes. Babur “Bobby” Singh, single parent and owner of fledging Uber business “Move with Bobby,” remains ever hopeful about ascending the ladder of American success. He lives in an affluent suburb of New York with his daughter Angie, an introverted teenager who is uncomfortable in...
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NEW YORK TIMES and MIBA BESTSELLER
From the St. Louis–based journalist often credited with first predicting Donald Trump's presidential victory.
"A collection of sharp-edged, humanistic pieces about the American heartland...Passionate pieces that repeatedly assail the inability of many to empathize and to humanize." — Kirkus
In 2015, Sarah Kendzior collected the essays she reported for Al Jazeera and published
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"Clyde Griffiths was born poor and is poorly educated, but his prospects begin to improve when he is offered a job by a wealthy uncle who owns a shirt factory. Soon he achieves a managerial position, and despite being warned to stay away from the women he manages, he becomes involved with Roberta, a poor factory worker who falls in love with him. At the same time, he catches the eye of Sondra, the glamorous socialite daughter of another factory owner,...
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"Cedric The Entertainer's debut novel Flipping Boxcars is a valentine to close-knit black families and tightly woven communities during the Depression and World War II. The story is also an homage to Cedric's grandfather, who in this tale emerges as Babe. He is a charismatic and widely loved man. He is also a gambler, whose gift of gab often gets him out of tricky situations. Babe is also a dreamer, something he shares in common with his patient and...
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How could two hardworking people do everything right in life, a woman asks, and end up destitute? Willa Knox and her husband followed all the rules as responsible parents and professionals, and have nothing to show for it but debts and an inherited brick house that is falling apart. The magazine where Willa worked has folded; the college where her husband had tenure has closed. Their dubious shelter is also the only option for a disabled father-in-law...
18) American Street
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Back to School (teens)
Caribbean American Heritage Month (teens)
School Stories (teen)
Teen Readalikes for Adult Books
Caribbean American Heritage Month (teens)
School Stories (teen)
Teen Readalikes for Adult Books
Description
On the corner of American Street and Joy Road, Fabiola Toussaint thought she would finally find une belle vie -- a good life. But after they leave Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Fabiola's mother is detained by U.S. immigration, leaving Fabiola to navigate her loud American cousins, Chantal, Donna, and Princess; the grittiness of Detroit's west side; a new school; and a surprising romance, all on her own. Just as she finds her footing in this strange new world,...
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A dazzling and heartfelt novel about the disorientation of grief, the hollowness of the American Dream, and the bravery of rebuilding one's identity, as the remaining daughter of a self-made Chinese-American dynasty sets off across the world to define herself in the wake of her beloved sister's death. From rags to riches, sleepy Oregon to haute New York, they are the biracial Chinese American family that built Kaleidoscope, a glittering, 'global bohemian'...
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Revered today across the political spectrum, Abraham Lincoln believed in a small but active government in a nation defined by aspiration. He embraced the market and the transportation and communications revolutions beginning to take hold, and helped give birth to the modern industrial economy. Lincoln's vision of an upwardly mobile society that rewards and supports individual striving was wondrously realized. Now, it is under threat. Economic stagnation...