10 books about homelessness

When Lulu's mother's van breaks down, money for food becomes tight and Hunger Monster comes into their lives. Only visible to Lulu, Hunger Monster is a troublemaker who makes it hard for her to concentrate in school. How will Lulu help her mom and defeat Monster when Lulu has promised never to speak its name to anyone?

Based on years of embedded fieldwork and painstakingly gathered data, this masterful book transforms our understanding of extreme poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving a devastating, uniquely American problem.

Pride and Prejudice is a novel of manners by Jane Austen, first published in 1813. The story follows the main character, Elizabeth Bennet, as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education, and marriage in the society of the landed gentry of the British Regency.

How do individuals move from being homeless to finding safe, stable, and secure places to live? Can we recreate the conditions that helped them most? What policies are needed to support what worked-and to remove common obstacles?Addressing these questions, Jamie Rife and Donald Burnes start from the premise that the most important voices in efforts to end homelessness are the ones most often missing from the discussion: the voices of those with lived experience. In Journeys Out of Homelessness, they gather the first-person stories of some who have not only survived, but thrived, going on to find positive home situations.Highlighting what we can learn from these personal stories, Rife and Burnes combine them with in-depth discussions of key themes and issues and point to the shifts necessary in current policy and practice that are essential if we are to effectively respond to a problem that has reached epic proportions.

A little girl and her parents have lost their home and must live in a homeless shelter. Even worse, due to a common shelter policy, her dad must live in a men's shelter, separated from her and her mom. Despite these circumstances, the family still finds time to be together. They meet at the park to play hide-and-seek, slide on slides, and pet puppies. While the young girl wishes for better days when her family is together again under a roof of their very own, she continues to remind herself that they're still a family even in times of separation.

A humorous and heartwarming bounce-to-the-beat underdog story about a young rapper whose rhymes help bring his community together. Eleven-year-old Simon Barnes dreams of becoming a world-famous rapper that everyone calls Notorious D.O.G. But for now, he's just a Chicago fifth grader who's small for this age and afraid to use his voice. Simon prefers to lay low at school and at home, even though he's constantly spitting rhymes in his head. But when his new teacher assigns the class an oral presentation on something that affects their community, Simon must face his fears. With some help from an unexpected ally and his neighborhood crew, will Simon gain the confidence to rap his way to an A and prove that one kid can make a difference in his 'hood?

"This masterpiece of dogged and loving reporting will astonish you and touch your heart. The struggles and quest for redemption of football star Jackie Wallace make for a fall-from-grace tale that's both unsettling and uplifting."--Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci The heartbreaking and redemptive story of a fallen-from-grace NFL player discovered by a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist on the streets of New Orleans, and the transformative friendship that binds them. In 1990, while covering a story about homelessness for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Ted Jackson encountered a half-naked drug addict sleeping under a bridge. After snapping a photo, Jackson woke the man. Pointing to the daily newspaper by his feet, the homeless stranger looked the photojournalist in the eye and said, "You ought to do a story about me." When Ted asked why, he was stunned by the answer. "Because, I've played in three Super Bowls." That chance meeting was the start of Ted's thirty-year relationship with Jackie Wallace, a former NFL star who rose to the pinnacle of fame and fortune, only to crash and lose it all. Getting to know Jackie, Ted learned the details of his life, and how he spiraled into the "vortex of darkness" that left him addicted and living on the streets of New Orleans. Ted chronicles Jackie's life from his teenage years in New Orleans through college and the NFL to the end of his pro career and the untimely death of his mother--devastating events that led him into addiction and homelessness. Throughout, Ted pays tribute to the enduring friendship he shares with this man he has come to help and also look at as an inspiration. But Ted is not naïve; he speaks frankly about the risk that such a relationship poses: Can a man like Jackie recover, or is he destined to roam the streets until his end? Tragic and triumphant, inspiring and infuriating, You Ought to Do a Story About Me offers a rare glimpse into the precarious world of homelessness and the lingering impact of systemic racism and poverty on the lives of NOLA's citizens. Lyrical and evocative, Ted's account is pure, singular, and ambitious--a timeless tale about loss, redemption, and hope in their multifarious forms. You Ought to Do a Story About Me features black-and white photographs throughout.

A powerful and sobering look behind the growing epidemic of homelessness that is destroying our neighborhoods, our cities, people's lives and future generations. In one of the richest countries in the world, how is this happening? Why? And perhaps more significantly, what can be done to turn it around? The ANSWERS are never easy, but they do exist...once we begin to ask the right QUESTIONS.

In this picture book, a boy writes a letter to an imagined alien, explaining all the things he will need to know about Earth and the people who live here--and adding a postscript asking what the alien might look like.

Work hard to get ahead; the poor are mostly minorities in inner cities living lazily off of welfare fraud; the government spends more on welfare than anywhere else in the world; America is a land of equal opportunity with easy social mobility for all. These are but a handful of the many myths about poverty in America, some of which have persisted for decades, with significant and harmful consequences on our social policy, our social compacts, and ourselves.Poorly Understood seeks to challenge and debunk these myths, along the way asking tough questions about how and why they have persisted and what it would take to replace them with true stories.