A stunning array of more than two hundred vivid images spanning more than 150 years of photographic history and various regions around the globe captures people at work in the world's great cities and rural hamlets, from nineteenth-century China to twenty-first-century New York.

The author recalls his poverty-stricken youth in Alabama in the 1960s and 70s, focusing on the extraordinary efforts of his mother to protect her sons from the violence of their father, a man scarred by war, and telling of the sacrifices she made so her children could have a better life.

Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the apalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was championed by more progressive thinkers, including then...

The lives of middle-aged women struggling with jobs and family, friendship and romance, are captured to perfection in this collection of humorous and touching stories set in the contemporary Southwest. Mary Sojourner writes about hardworking, hard-living, blue-collar women who fight quietly and fiercely to make their way in the world, find love and beauty, and hold on to their hopes. The heroines, most of them over forty, include single moms, aging...

"A best-selling and beloved author, at the very top of his game, now returns to North Bath, in upstate New York, and the characters who made Nobody's Fool, his third novel, his first great success. The irresistible Sully, who in the intervening years has come by some unexpected good fortune, is now staring down a VA cardiologist's estimate that he only has a year or two left, and he's busy as hell keeping the news from the most important people in...

The adventures of an orphaned young man in Victorian England who is given a great deal of money by an unknown benefactor to enable him to live as a gentleman, pursuing a good education and fulfilling great expectations.

"In this beloved adaptation of the Broadway stage hit, Hepburn plays a sassy, working-class London street vendor, whom an arrogant professor attempts to turn into a sophisticated lady through proper schooling. But, when the humble flower girl blossoms into the toast of London's elite, her teacher may have a lesson or two to learn himself."--Container.

Presents the life of Robert Peace, an African American who became a brillant biochemistry student at Yale University, but after graduation lived as drug dealer and was brutally murdered at the age of thirty.