Lyons Regional Library

"Vance, a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, provides an account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like...

President Bill Clinton gives us his views on the challenges facing the United States today and why government matters. He explains how we got into the current economic crisis, and offers specific recommendations on how we can put people back to work, increase bank lending and corporate investment, double our exports, restore our manufacturing base, and create new businesses. He supports President Obama's emphasis on green technology, saying that...

For the last twenty years, Melinda Gates has been on a mission to find solutions for people with the most urgent needs, wherever they live. Throughout this journey, one thing has become increasingly clear to her: If you want to lift a society up, you need to stop keeping women down. In this book, she shares lessons she’s learned from the inspiring people she’s met during her work and travels around the world. Her unforgettable narrative is backed...

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption....

Franklin Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933 confronting twenty-five-percent unemployment, bank closings, and a nationwide crisis in confidence. Between March 9 and June 16, FDR sent Congress a record number of bills, all of which passed easily. With reforms ranging from the legalization of alcohol to mortgage relief for millions of Americans, Roosevelt launched the New Deal that conservatives have been working to roll back ever since. Badger

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A feminist manifesto by the great modernist writer contends that women's literature would be on a par with that of men, if women had the same levels of income, privacy, and experience as their counterparts. Her main illustration of this principle is a hypothetical sister to Shakespeare, who, even with the same talents as her brother, would have never been given the chance to display her talents to the world.

woven from the stories of Depression-era families who were helped by gifts from the author's generous and secretive grandfather. Ted Gup, and the generosity he describes, gives us abundant reason to take heart today. Shortly before Christmas 1933 in Depression-scarred Canton, Ohio, a small newspaper ad offered $10 to 75 families in distress. Readers were asked to submit letters describing their hardships to a benefactor calling himself Mr B. Virdot....

"Iceland is the best place on earth to be a woman-but why? For the past twelve years, the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report has ranked Iceland number one on its list of countries closing the gap in equality between men and women. What is it about Iceland that makes many women's experience there so positive? Why has their society made such meaningful progress in this ongoing battle, from electing the world's first female president to...

"We all sense it--something big is going on. You feel it in your workplace. You feel it when you talk to your kids. You can't miss it when you read the newspapers or watch the news. Our lives are being transformed in so many realms all at once--and it is dizzying. In Thank You for Being Late, a work unlike anything he has attempted before, Thomas L. Friedman exposes the tectonic movements that are reshaping the world today and explains how to get...

"One of our most influential progressive voices tells the story of the hollowing of the American middle class and lays out the choices that we must make now to ensure that the dream of prosperity can live on for generations." --Provided by the publisher.